Journal of Art Historiography Number 22 June 2020 Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics1 Michael Young For Joseph Connors Figure 1 Oskar Pollak, photograph from Matura (gymnasium graduation), 1901 Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien https://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/institutsarchiv/pollak-oskar/ All but forgotten today, the art historian Oskar Pollak (fig. 1), who died in 1915, has three claims on our attention. The first is his pioneering documentary research: his exhaustive compilations of documents related to artistic patronage in Rome under 1 I am grateful to Suzanne Marchand, Margaret Olin and Nancy Wingfield for reading the unrevised text of the talk on which this article is based. They saved me from committing some embarrassing errors, although of course none of them is responsible for any errors or imperfections that remain in this version. I am heavily indebted to the kindness and generous assistance of the following archivists: Friedrich Polleroß at the Art History Institute of the Universität Wien, Florian König at the Istituto Storico Austriaco a Roma, Andreas Titton at the Archive of the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien, Jan Chodějovský at the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague and Barbara Pospichal, Thomas Maisel and Luka Rucigaj at the Archiv der Universität Wien. I am also grateful to Jiří Koukal for sharing archivalia and information with me. Nicholas Sawicki was an erudite, intelligent and sympathetic referee whose suggestions vastly improved my text and uncovered many blunders. I am deeply greatful to him. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 2 three seventeenth-century popes, and his study of guidebooks to Rome from the same period. The second claim, related to the first, is the glimpse into the cultural politics and social history of Late Imperial Austria offered by his life and career. Finally, his scholarly research, both planned and published, engages a set of problems which, while not currently at the center of art historical thinking and writing, remains compelling and fundamentally unresolved: the identification and analysis of the development of artistic styles over time and within the work of individual artists, and the relation of individual works of art to both types of development. Pollak’s art historical scholarship is today remembered only by a handful of historians of Roman and Bohemian Baroque art. After completing a doctorate in art history at the German University in Prague in 1907, he spent three years as a member of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome. From 1910 to 1913 he was Assistent2 to Max Dvořák while studying at the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna, returning to the Institute in Rome for briefer periods of research. He completed his Habilitation at Vienna in 1914. He died on the Italian front at Isonzo in 1915, at the age of 32, prompting emotional tributes by friends and illustrious colleagues. Indeed, the esteem he inspired in some of his most celebrated contemporaries is in direct proportion to the scale of art-historical oblivion in which he currently languishes. By the time of his death at the front, Pollak had earned the admiration of influential scholars and artists. The Viennese art historian Hans Tietze praised the conscientiousness that compelled Pollak to uncover documents, source material in archives, period guidebooks and treatises exhaustively before undertaking the 2 This was a paid position that required service as a research and teaching assistant, with an initial appointment of two years that could be extended to four or six years: Karl von Kelle, Die österreichischen Universitätsgesetze Sammlung der für die österreichischen Universitäten gültigen Gesetze, Verordnungen, Erlässe, Studien- und Prüfungsordnungen usw, Wien: Manzsche k. u. k. Hof-Verlags- und Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1906, 214ff: Assistenten sind remunerierte Gehilfen des Professors, welche sich zugleich für das Lehramt seines Faches unter seiner Leitung ausbilden sollen. Hieraus ergibt sich, daß sie während der Dauer dieser Anstellung nicht als selbständige Lehrer desselben Faches auftreten können, indem diese Stellung die Möglichkeit in sich schließen würde, daß sie, statt den Unterricht des Professors zu fördern, den Wirkungen desselben auf die Schüler störend entgegentreten. Dieselben werden daher als Dozenten in demselben Fache nur insofern zugelassen werden können, als zunächst der Professor, welchem sie beigegeben sind, es als vereinbar mit den Obliegenheiten ihrer Anstellung findet, und als sie überdies nur Spezialkollegien über eine Partie des Faches, welche abgesondert zu behandeln der Professor nicht in der Lage ist, unter seiner Kontrolle, d. i. in solcher Weise zu lesen geneigt sind, daß jeder Widerspruch ihrer Lehre mit den von dem Professor vorgetragenen Grundsätzen ausgeschlossen sei (223). Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 3 stylistic and critical analysis of works of art.3 Oskar Kokoschka considered Pollak the best of Max Dvořák’s followers, according to a letter from the painter’s wife Olda Kokoschka to Pollak’s niece.4 Ludwig von Pastor, the author of the monumental History of the Popes and director of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, lauded Pollak’s scholarly achievements, his archival discoveries and his collection and study of Early Modern Roman guide-books. Pastor eulogized Pollak as ‘one of the saddest losses among the war victims from the scholarly world…an indefatigable scholar, a dutiful civil servant and a lovable man’.5 What precisely was Pollak’s achievement as an art historian that inspired these encomia? In his 1915 review of Tietze’s 1913 treatise, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, Pollak took note of Tietze's assertion that It is not the work of art itself that is the object of art-historical exploration, but the work of art at the specific place in artistic development to which it belongs. The knowledge of this circumstance, with all its consequences, is the presupposition and the core of art-historical contemplation. By and large, it is generally accepted that the work of art is uniquely determined by its developmental-historical circumstances of origin. It is not only due to the locally and temporally conditioned circumstances of its creation and in the personal development of an individual creator-and at a very particular point of this personal development - and anchored in the general development of time, but also by the original effect that triggered it through the response it provoked, firmly bound to that time. The Kunstwollen of a time is determined not only by the works it produces, but 3 Hans Tietze, '† Oskar Pollak', Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, N.F. 26, July 9, 1915, 489-491, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik: ‘Studien über das römische Barock überzeugten ihn immer mehr von der Unzulänglichkeit unserer Kenntnisse dieser Kunst; seine Gewissenhaftigkeit nötigte ihn, ehe er an die stilkritischen Themen ging, die ihm vorschwebten, eine Quellenerschließung auf breitester Grundlage vorzunehmen’. 4‘Mein Mann erinnert sich sehr gut an Dr. Oskar Pollak, den er für den besten Dvorak (sic)- Nachfolger hielt und seinen Tod für einer grossen Verlust’, Undated letter from Olda Kokoschka to Pollak’s niece Anna Sicher, graciously shared with me by Dana Nachtigallová, granddaughter of Pollak’s younger brother Ernst/Arnošt. 5 Ludwig von Pastor, 'Der Heldentod des Dr. Oskar Pollak', Fremden-Blatt 186, 7 Juli 1915, 8: ‘Dem unermüdlichen Gelehrten, dem pflichtgetreuen Beamten und liebenswürdigen Menschen ist bei allen, die ihn gekannt haben, ein dauerndes Andenken gesichert’, accessed through Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online, http://anno.onb.ac.at/. The Dutch art historian Johannes Orbaan’s obituary for Pollak sounded similar notes: J.A.F.Orbaan, “Feuilleton: Oskar Pollak †11 Juni 1915.”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung und schweizerisches Handelsblatt,136:1118, August 27, 1915, 1-2. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 4 also by the effect they produce; Production and consumption are the two halves of each phase of artistic development. 6 Pollak responded in his review that ‘The position of the work of art in its development, however…is not immediately comprehensible to us; the opportunity to apprehend it is offered to us by source studies and criticism of the sources’.7 Both Tietze and Pollak may appear here as votaries of Alois Riegl’s effort to reveal the evolution and genealogies of art works and artistic styles, both of individual artists and of specific historical periods and regions encompassed by such terms as ‘Gothic’, ‘Baroque’ and ‘Plateresque’, inter alia. The discovery and publication of sources and documents as a means to clarifying the position of the work of art in relation to artistic development over time and within the work of an individual artist describes Pollak’s art historical task, as he appears to have understood it. This task was consistent with the interests and goals of Pollak’s predecessors and teachers at the Vienna Institute, from its founders in the 1850s through Rudolf von Eitelberger and Julius von Schlosser8. Of course the pioneering nature of Pollak’s 6 Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, ein Versuch , Leipzig, E.A. Seemann, 1913, 174 (accessible on HathiTrust).: Nicht das Kunstwerk an sich ist der Gegenstand kunstgeschichtlicher Erforschung, sondern das Kunstwerk an der bestimmten Stelle, die ihm in der Entwicklung gebührt. Die Erkenntnis dieses Umstandes mit allen seinen Konsequenzen ist Voraussetzung und Kern der kunstgeschichtlichen Betrachtung. Im großen und ganzen ist es wohl allgemein anerkannt, daß das Kunstwerk durch seine Entstehungsumstände entwicklungsgeschichtlich eindeutig bestimmt ist. Nicht nur durch die Umstände seiner Entstehung ist es örtlich zeitlich bedingt und in der persönlichen Entwicklung eines individuellen Schöpfers — und zwar an einem ganz bestimmten Punkt dieser persönlichen Entwicklung — sowie in der allgemeinen Zeitentwicklung verankert, sondern auch durch die ursprüngliche Wirkung, die es auslöste, durch den Widerhall, den es erregte, fest an jene Zeit gebunden. Das Kunstwollen einer Zeit ist nicht nur durch die Werke bestimmt, die sie hervorbringt, sondern auch durch die Wirkung, die jene erzielten; Produktion und Konsum sind die beiden Hälften jeder Phase der künstlerischen Entwicklung. 7 Oskar Pollak, “Review of Hans Tietze, Methode Der Kunstgeschichte.”, Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, N.F. 26:2, October 9, 1914, 32: 'Die Stellung des Kunstwerkes in seiner Entwickelung [sic] ist aber — trotz seiner Fortexistenz — nicht unmittelbar für uns erfaßbar; die Möglichkeit dazu bietet uns die Quellenkunde und die Kritik der Quellen'. 8 The Institute’s Web Site emphasizes this continuity, and relates it to the internal conflicts within the Institute which I will examine anon: Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 5 work in the Archivio segreto of the Vatican was partly owing to the opening of the archive to outsiders for the first time by Pope Leo XIII in 1881, at a moment when interest in Roman Baroque Art was barely underway, and archival and documentary research related to it had not yet begun. Figure 2 Title page of the first volume of Pollak’s posthumously published collection of documents related to Roman Baroque art Ein enges Verhältnis bestand auch mit dem 1854 gegründeten Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (IÖG), das Gelehrte wie Thausing, Wickhoff, Riegl und Dvořak bis hin zu Rosenauer ausbildete. Zum dreijährigen Lehrgang für Archivare zählte ab 1874 auch das Fach Kunstgeschichte. Damit verbunden ist ein anderes prägendes Merkmal der Wiener Kunstgeschichte, nämlich das Interesse an historischen Quellentexten. Die systematische Edition und Analyse historischer Schriften über Kunstwerke und Künstler ist eng mit den Namen Eitelberger und Schlosser verbunden. Diese methodische Pluralität verlief in der Praxis nicht immer ohne Reibungsverluste und führte, verstärkt durch persönliche Unverträglichkeiten, zwischen 1911 und 1933 sogar zur räumlichen Trennung der beiden Lehrstühle in zwei rivalisierende, von Strzygowski bzw. Dvořák und Schlosser geleitete Institute. Komparatistisch-formalistische sowie geistesgeschichtliche bzw. quellenkundliche Ansätze standen sich damit gegenüber. Erst 1936 übernahm Sedlmayr den nunmehr einzigen Lehrstuhl im “wiedervereinigten” Institut. Accessed through https://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/geschichte-des-instituts/. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 6 Indeed the work for which Pollak is still remembered by scholars of the Roman Baroque was a posthumously published collection of documents related to artistic activity during the pontificate of Urban VIII (fig. 2).9 This monumental work of enduring value had an eventful, and revealing, afterlife in which the volatile forces that shaped both Pollak’s career and the cultural politics of Late Imperial Austria emerged in their most malevolent form. Pollak’s devotion to documentary and archival research is likely to excite few of those drawn to the theoretical complexity of the Vienna School and its fraught theoretical and methodological divisions. Pollak’s work would hardly have appealed to Walter Benjamin, and no doubt invited the scorn that the second Vienna School cultivated for the ‘first art history’, which Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt, among others, maintained was superseded by the second, strenge Kunstwissenschaft and Strukturanalyse. Yet this particular emphasis and the enduring contributions of Pollak’s research were rooted in the same forces that brought into being the Vienna School and in its primary lines of conflict. The antipathy between the liberal supranational Austrian patriots Riegl and Wickhoff (followed by their students Dvořák and Schlosser), and the Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semite Josef Strzygowski10 has been admirably described by Margaret Olin, Suzanne Marchand, Ján Bákoš and Mathew Rampley among others.11 Riegl and his colleagues shifted 9 Oskar Pollak, Die Kunsttätigkeit unter Urban VIII, aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben von Dagobert Frey unter Mitwirkung von Franz Juraschek, Band I. Kirchliche Bauten (mit Ausnahme von St. Peter) und Paläste, Wien-Augsburg-Köln: Filser, 1928, and Die Kunstta ̈tigkeit unter Urban VIII. / 2, Die Peterskirche in Rom, Wien: Filser, 1931. 10 Strzygowski in fact dismissed Tietze's 1913 treatise on methodology as belonging to ‘the Art History of yesteryear’, particularly disparaging its emphasis upon written sources: Josef Strzygowski, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften: vorgeführt am Beispiele der Forschung über bildende Kunst, Vienna, A. Schroll & Company, 1923, 48 and 64, accessed through https://books.google.com/. Riccardo Marchi notes that : According to Edwin Lachnit (‘Kunstgeschichte und zeitgenössische Kunst: Das wissenschaftliche Verhältnis zum lebendigen Forschungsgegenstands am Beispiel der älteren Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1984, 159), Tietze, in his criticism of absolute innovators (Tietze, Methode, v and 30), could have been taking aim at Strzygowski himself. [Now see also Edwin Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit: Zum Verhältnis von Methode und Forschungsgegenstand am Beginn der Moderne, Vienna: Böhlau, 2005, 99]. Marchi, 'Hans Tietze and art history as Geisteswissenschaft in early twentieth-century Vienna', Journal of Art Historiography, Number 5, December 2011, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/marchi.pdf. 11Margaret Olin, 'Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Habsburg Empire', Austrian Studies 5, 1994, 107-120; Suzanne L.Marchand, 'Appreciating the Art of Others – Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 7 attention away from the habitual limitations of both the Humanist philological tradition and Classical archaeology (which relied heavily on text-based scholarship) to include a positive assessment of late Roman art, hitherto disparaged as an art of decline. Strzygowski, a harbinger of multi-culturalism, ridiculed their Euro- and Rome-centrism and the reliance of classical and early Christian archaeologists upon texts as essential evidence12. In a book published in 1922, Strzygowski summarized the position vis-à-vis textual scholarship in art history which he had consistently advocated for three decades: ‘The written source can never achieve the value of or replace the fact of the monument or even the work of art as an essential source for the specialist’.13 Strzygowski’s championing and studying of Byzantine and oriental art appears to have been as much an assault upon the Rome- and Eurocentric emphasis in the work of his Viennese Liberal adversaries, and upon their interest in textual Josef Strzygowski and the Austrian Origins of Non-Western Art History', in Piotr Otto Scholz and Magdalena Anna Długosz, eds., Von Biala nach Wien: Josef Strzygowski und die Kunstwissenschaften, Wien: Ibera, 2015, 256-286 and ‘The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory, 33:4, Dec., 1994, 106-130; Jás Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25:3, June 2002, 358-379; Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847-1918, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013; Ján Bakoš, Discourses and Strategies : The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping Central European Approaches to Art History & Related Discourses, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013; Georg Vasold, 'Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of Art', Journal of Art Historiography 5, December, 2011, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/vassold.pdf. For Strzygowski’s anti- semitism, see Margaret Olin, ‘Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski’, in Penny Schine Gold and Benjamin C. Sax, eds., Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000, 151-170 and The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 18-24. 12 Marchand, ‘Rhetoric of Artifacts’, 118, observes of Strzygowski’s study of oriental art that Strzygowski also legitimized his efforts by underscoring the anonymity of the objects he described, their failure to divert the multitude of sheeplike art historians and archaeologists from their traditional classicizing pursuits, and the lack of textual documentation to explain their origins and appearances. These peculiar privileges - anonymity of the objects, lack of relevant documentation, superior comprehension of the eyewitness - permitted Strzygowski to address himself wholly to the morphological clues inherent in the objects and to the "fundamental" conditions - the date, origin, and authorship - of their existence. As an example of this phenomenon, Marchand cites Josef Strzygowski, ‘Die Byzantinische Kunst’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 1 (1892), 62-63. 13 Strzygowski, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften, 72, quoted and translated in Rampley, Vienna School, 27. https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Penny+Schine+Gold https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Benjamin+C.+Sax Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 8 art-historical sources and documentation, as it was an affirmation of the artifacts he studied, which often lacked any but the most rudimentary textual documentation. The commitment of the the Austrian Liberal art historians in Vienna to the study and publication of textual sources was long-standing: Rudolf von Eitelberger had edited and published a series of Quellenschriften between 1871 and 1882,14 and Julius von Schlosser is remembered today principally for his collections of textual sources in art history, beginning in 1892 and culminating in the 1924 publication of his Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte. Arnold Witte has affirmed the centrality of textual and archival sources for Alois Riegl’s later scholarship, specifically in the study of Roman Baroque Art that was culled from his lectures and published posthumously in 190815 and 1923.16 Witte identified as one of Riegl’s principal contributions to art historical thought on the Baroque the ‘taking into account [of] contemporary historical sources’.17 A prime piece of evidence for Riegl’s prizing of such documentary sources is his translation of Filippo Baldinucci’s Life of Bernini,18 posthumously completed and co-edited by none other than Oskar Pollak and Arthur Burda, the librarian of the Vienna Hofmuseum. Strzygowski championed instead the superiority of the object as the primary source material of art-historical research and asserted the importance of non-European art. It should be remembered in this connection that the posthumous fate of Pollak’s unpublished research was shaped by later protagonists in conflicts analogous to those within the Vienna Institute of Art History, including those between anti-Facist art historians and their counterparts among Nazi sympathizers and party members. Echoes of this conflict among Viennese art historians are discernible in Oskar Pollak’s published work. In his aforementioned review of Hans Tietze’s methodological treatise, Pollak praises the author for being the first to raise questions that art historians, ‘whose worst enemies are within their own camp’, had so far avoided. Pollak describes art history as a discipline that threatens to become a hotbed for the most awful and most clueless dilettantism, a dilettantism which is slowly extending its hands into 14 Rampley, Vienna School, 26-28. 15 Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, akademiche Vorlesungen gehalten von Alois Riegl. Aus seinen hinterlassenen Papieren herausgegeben von Arthur Burda und Max Dvor ̌ák. Edited by Max Dvor ̌ák, Wien: A. Schroll, 1908, accessed through archive.org/. 16 Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung Der Barockkunst in Rom: Mit 32 Bildertaf. Edited by Arthur Burda and Max Dvor ̌ák 2. Aufled. Wien: Schroll, 1923. 17 Arnold Witte, ‘Reconstructing Riegl's Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom’, in Alois Riegl, Andrew Hopkins, Arnold Alexander Witte, and Alina Alexandra Payne. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Texts & Documents. Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Research Institute, 2010, 53. 18 Filippo Baldinucci, Vita des Gio. Lorenzo Bernini, mit Uebersetzung und Kommentar von Alois Riegl, aus seinem Nachlasse herausgegeben von Arthur Burda und Oskar Pollak. Translated by Alois Riegl. Wien: A. Schroll, 1912, accessed through archive.org/. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 9 the universities. The greatest danger to a tranquil development of this discipline is the lack of agreement among its appointed representatives about the concepts, the nature, the purpose and the goals of their field. Each has a different understanding of what constitutes ‘art history’. If Tietze’s book accomplished nothing besides serving as the impetus for the clarification of this unfortunate situation, it would still be a great achievement. It is the more worthy of admiration, for avoiding the temptation to indulge in fruitless polemics. Objectivity and quiet seriousness prevail. In the place of purely destructive negativity, Tietze offers what is positively constructive!19 Here the reference seems unmistakable to the conflicts with Strzygowski, who was a pugnacious master of the kind of vitriolic invective immortalized by Mark Twain’s 1897 reports from the Austrian parliament.20 Oskar Pollak’s intellectual development, evolving ethnic identity and political sympathies over the course of his short life illuminate the same tensions within the Vienna School of Art History and, to be sure, throughout Late Imperial Austria. The German-speaking Jewish community in Prague into which he was born in 1883 and where he grew to maturity was a flashpoint for the Empire’s national conflicts and intellectual ferment at that fateful time. There, the percentage of German speakers in the half century prior to his birth had diminished considerably, as had their political influence, and an increasing percentage of that population was Jewish. By 1900, less than ten percent of Prague residents identified as German- speakers, of whom more than half were Jewish. This made Prague’s German minority (and the German-speaking Jews who lived in smaller cities in Bohemia and 19Pollak, review of Tietze, 29: Und besonders bei einer Disziplin, die die schlimmsten Feinde im eigenen Lager hat, die heute der Tummelplatz des ärgsten und ahnungslosesten Dilettantismus zu werden droht, eines Dilettantismus, der langsam, aber sicher seine Hände auch nach den Universitäten ausstreckt. Das gefährlichste für eine ruhige Entwicklung dieser Disziplin ist aber der Umstand, daß die berufenen Vertreter des Faches sich über Begriff, Wesen, Zweck und Ziele ihres Faches nicht einig sind, daß fast ein jeder unter »Kunstgeschichte« etwas anderes verstanden wissen will. Und wenn das Buch keinen anderen Erfolg hat, als daß es den Anstoß zu einer Klärung dieser unerfreulichen Lage gibt, so ist schon viel gewonnen. Geradezu bewunderungswert ist es, wie ein bei diesem Stande der Dinge so heikles Unternehmen überall der nahen Versuchung, sich in unfruchtbaren Polemiken zu ergehen, ausweicht, wie überall Sachlichkeit und ruhiger Ernst vorherrschen; kein bloßes negatives Zerstören, sondern positives Aufbauen! 20 Mark Twain, ‘Stirring Times in Austria’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 96, March, 1898, 530-40, accessed through https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stirring_Times_in_Austria. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 10 Moravia) distinctive among German Bohemians, most of whom were non-Jews and lived in the border regions near Germany and in interior Sprachinseln (linguistic islands). Prague Germans were predominantly upper-middle class and did not have much of a proletariat; their reliance on Jews to swell their ranks, coupled with the social and economic advantages conferred by wealth, inclined them strongly toward Austrian Liberalism and the rejection of anti-Semitism. Their nationalism vis-à-vis Czechs in particular and non-Germans in general appears in retrospect to have been rooted in a sense of cultural, as opposed to racial, superiority. In the border regions and in the interior linguistic islands, the Bohemian Germans inhabited rural villages and small to medium-sized towns. Unlike the Prague Germans, these Bohemian Germans included an economically and socially highly variegated population, ranging from aristocrats and prosperous farmers to members of the lower-middle- class and industrial laborers, handworkers, miners and peasants. Members of these groups who were nationally conscious were far more inclined than the Prague Germans to embrace Pan-German racial nationalism and to reject Liberalism, and they grew increasingly anti-Semitic during Pollak’s youth.21 Pollak’s membership in the Prague German community owed more to Bildung than to affluence; a day after his fifteenth birthday, Pollak lost his father Adolf, a merchant of middling success whose death left the family in straitened circumstances.22 This lack of means compelled Pollak to seek employment in 1903 as a tutor to Walter Philipp, the son of the Prague Jewish magnate Louis Alois Goldreich von Bronneck at the Schloss at Ober-Studenetz. Oskar Pollak is better known today for his close friendship with his classmate Franz Kafka than for his art historical scholarship. Pollak appears to have dazzled Kafka with the breadth and variety of his interests – in the Upanishads, 21 There is a vast and rich literature about the struggle between nationalities in Prague and Bohemia and the position of the Jews therein. All of the following can be read with profit: Gary B. Cohen, 'Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860-1914', Central European History, 10: 1, Mar., 1977, 28-54, and The politics of ethnic survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914, 2nd Revised Edition, West Lafayette, Ind: Purdue University Press., 2006; Wilma A. Iggers,’The Flexible National Identities of Bohemian Jewry’, East Central Europe 7:1, 1980, 39-48; Scott Spector, Prague territories: national conflict and cultural innovation in Franz Kafka's fin de siècle, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000; Christoph Stölzl, Kafkas böses Böhmen: zur Sozialgeschichte eines Prager Juden, München: Edition Text + Kritik 1974; Nicholas Sawicki, ‘The Critic as Patron and Mediator: Max Brod, Modern Art and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Prague’, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6, 2012, 30-51; Dimitry Shumsky, Zweisprachigkeit und binationale Idee : der Prager Zionismus 1900-1930, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 2013; Pieter Judson, ‘Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Hapsburg Monarchy’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 33, 1993, 47-67 and Hillel J. Kieval, The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. 22 Prager Tageblatt 246, 7 September, 1898, 17, accessed through Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online, http://anno.onb.ac.at/. https://www.academia.edu/2626332/_The_Critic_as_Patron_and_Mediator_Max_Brod_Modern_Art_and_Jewish_Identity_in_Early_Twentieth-Century_Prague._Images_A_Journal_of_Jewish_Art_and_Visual_Culture_6_2012_30-51 https://www.academia.edu/2626332/_The_Critic_as_Patron_and_Mediator_Max_Brod_Modern_Art_and_Jewish_Identity_in_Early_Twentieth-Century_Prague._Images_A_Journal_of_Jewish_Art_and_Visual_Culture_6_2012_30-51 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 11 rowing, skiing, lute-playing, Nietzsche, Goethe, and, above all, art history.23 Because of Kafka’s letters to Pollak we know much about their earliest intellectual proclivities and influences. They were both enthusiastic readers of the German nationalist cultural journal Kunstwart. This was a populist, rather than an elite or avant-garde magazine. Its coverage of the visual arts was superintended by Paul Schultze-Naumburg, whose German nationalism, always palpable, grew more pronounced over time, and became more anti-Semitic, an arc that resembles the rise of pan-Germanism in Bohemia a few years later. The Kunstwart promoted self- improvement through healthful active living, dietary and clothing reform, and especially by means of aesthetic cultivation of the ‘authentic' in art, literature, theatre, music and arts and crafts.24 Even as they were consumers of the populist German cultural chauvinism of the Kunstwart, Pollak and Kafka had to navigate the treacherous conflicts of nationally divided Prague, Their classmate Hugo Bergmann, an early and influential Zionist in Prague, later librarian, philosophy professor and first rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, described the predicament of Jewish students in their Matura class of 1901: At that time, a Jew who had graduated from the University, if he was not willing to be baptized so as to be able to pursue a career in government service, had few alternatives to self-employment as a doctor or lawyer. Since 23 ‘Dozent Oskar Pollak gefallen’, Bohemia 183, 4.VII.1915, 12: quotes Hugo Bergmann Der Reichtum seiner Interessen war unerschöpflich: aber was immer ihn jeweils packte und fortriss, dem widmete er sich ganz, vergass darob alles andere und ward bald zum Verehrer und Verkünder. So studierte er die Upanischaden, die Bibel, Luther, Franziskus von Assisi, die italienischen Renaissance novellisten (mit welcher Reinheit wusste er den Decamerone vorzulesen!), so trieb er Lautenspiel und manchen Sport… Kafka’s interest in art history, which he surely owed to Pollak’s influence, is examined in Heinz Ladendorf, ‘Kafka und die Kunstgeschichte’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 23, 1961, 293- 326 and 25, 1963, 227-262. 24 Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1969, 123-25 and Kai K. Gutschow, 'Schultze-Naumburg's Heimatstil: A Nationalistic Conflict of Tradition and Modernity', 'Tradition, nationalism, and the creation of image': Traditional dwellings and settlements working paper series 36, 1992, 1-44, accessed through http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gutschow/publishing_links/02%20IASTE%20Paper%20C omplete.pdf. For Pollak’s and Kafka’s response to the Kunstwart, see Reiner Stach, Kafka, the Early Years (tr. Shelley Frisch), Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013, 195- 96, Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 59-62 and Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958, 103-07. http://kramerius.nkp.cz/kramerius/PShowIssue.do?it=0&id=977360 https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=283&queryString=se:Traditional%20dwellings%20and%20settlements%20working%20paper%20series%20; https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=283&queryString=se:Traditional%20dwellings%20and%20settlements%20working%20paper%20series%20; https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Klaus+Wagenbach&text=Klaus+Wagenbach&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 12 we both did not want this, we [along with Pollak] looked for another possibility and were advised to study chemistry because Jews had the opportunity to be accepted into the chemical industry.25 Indeed some form of state service, either in university teaching, museum work, or preservation of historic monuments, was, apart from opening a commercial art dealership (such as Ludwig Pollak did with great success in Rome), the only career option for an art historian. Most, not all, of the distinguished art historians of Jewish ancestry from Prague, including Paul Frankl and Hans Tietze, had parents who had converted to Christianity, or, like the aesthetician Emil Utitz, converted themselves. In addition to his having married a Jew, Hedwig Eisner, in 1907,26 a slight, but perhaps significant indication that Pollak identified affirmatively as Jewish is his 25 Hugo Bergmann, ‘Schulzeit und Studium’, in Hans-Gerd Koch,>>Als Kafka mir entgegenkam…<<. Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1995, 17-18: …einem Juden, der die Universität absolviert hatte, blieben unter den damaligen Umständen, wenn er sich nicht taufen lassen wollte, um eine staatliche Karriere einzuschlagen, praktisch nur die >>freien<< Berufe übrig; Arzt oder Advokat zu werden. Da wir beide dies nicht wollten, sahen wir uns nach einer anderen Möglichkeit um, und man riet uns, Chemie zu studieren, weil für Juden die Möglichkeit bestand in die chemische Industrie aufgenommen zu werden. 26Sbírka matrik - Archiv hlavního města Prahy- Trauungs-Matrik /matriky oddaných (registers of marriages) book 2703, 1907 35:230, accessed through http://badatelna.eu/fond/1073/reprodukce/?zaznamId=3504&reproId=84304. The marriage took place on September 3, 1907. Hedwig Eisner Pollak was described by Johannes Orbaan as a ‘gestreiche und liebevolle junge Frau…die seinem [Pollak’s] Streben ein feines Verständnis entgegenbrachte’, Orbaan, 1-2. She may be the embroidery artist of the same name who exhibited with the Wiener Werkstätte in Edinburgh in 1913 (see A. S. Levutus, ‘A Viennese Exhibition of Arts and Crafts’, International Studio 48:191, January, 1913, 224-225 Accessed through https://books.google.com/. Hedwig Pollak returned to Prague after her husband’s death, and worked as a photographer, supplying the portrait photograph of Max Dvořák which faced the frontispiece of Joseph Weingartner, Ein Gedenkblatt zur Trauerfeier fu ̈r Max Dvořák, Wien: Ed. Hölzel, 1921; see Hans Tietze, ‘Ein Gedenkblatt zur Trauerfeier für Max Dvorak’, Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 57:18, 27 Januar 1922, 307. Hedwig Pollak was deported to Theresienstadt in Transport V (her number was 473) on January 30, 1942, and deported in Transport Ar (her number was 279) to Zamosc in Poland on April 28, 1942, where she died or was murdered. https://www.holocaust.cz/databaze-obeti/obet/114851-hedvika-pollakova/. A chilling footnote to her tragic fate is the appearance of a Hedwig Pollak from the Czechoslovak Republic, also born in 1884, who escaped to London at the end of 1938. Her case file was stamped ‘cancelled’, which may indicate that she returned to Prague, perhaps to help an ailing relative or for some other urgent reason, not realizing that it would not be possible to leave. The National Archives of United Kingdom, HO - Records created or inherited by the Home Office, Ministry of Home Security, and related bodies, Division of Aliens and https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C150 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C150 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C512 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 13 curriculum vitae from his 1914 Habilitation defense, where he has added in longhand ‘mosaisch’ to his description of his nationality27 (figs 3 and 4). Pollak, Kafka and Bergmann all gave up chemistry very quickly. Figure 3 Pollak’s Curriculum Vitae from his Habilitation defense, with ‘mosaisch’ penciled in after ‘deutscher Nationalität’. Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Rektoratsarchive – Akademischer Senat – Personalblätter (19.-20. Jh), Pollak 2908 (fols 3R, 3V and 4R-Beilage 6). Figure 4 Enlargement of penciled in ‘mosaisch’ from Figure 3 above. Immigration, Denization and Naturalisation, Community Relations, Community Programmes and Equal Opportunities Departments, HO 294 - Czechoslovak Refugee Trust: Records, Subseries within HO 294 - CASE PAPERS OF REFUGEE FAMILIES, 'Old' Refugees, case number 173, Pollak, Hedwig, 1884. I am grateful to Richard Gaskell, webmaster of http://www.geocities.ws/czechandslovakthings/WW2_namelists.htm, for his generous assistance with locating these records. 27 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Rektoratsarchive – Akademischer Senat – Personalblätter (19.-20. Jh), Pollak 2908 (fols 3R, 3V and 4R-Beilage 6). The letter forms in the handwritten annotation of the curriculum vitae, particularly the ‘m’, the ‘a’ and the ‘sch’ without ligature between ‘s’ and ‘c’, when compared with Pollak’s handwriting in figure 6, strongly suggest that this ‘mosaisch’ annotation was an autograph one by Pollak. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C9158 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C9158 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C46962 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C148212 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C148212 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 14 Eventually Pollak’s sense of his prospects for making a career as an art historian without converting to Christianity was energized and greatly enlarged through contact with a remarkable network of unconverted Jewish art historians (classical archaeologists, actually) with strong ties to the Universities at Prague and Vienna and to the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome (Istituto storico austriaco). Wilhelm Klein (1850-1924) was a professor of Classical Archaeology at the German University in Prague, and the son of a traditional rabbi from the Banat region of Transylvania. Klein was a close advisor of Oskar Pollak’s and a member of his doctoral dissertation defense committee. Klein’s student Ludwig Pollak (1868-1943-- no relation to Oskar) was another unconverted Jew from Prague who made a brilliant career in Rome as an antiquarian scholar, collector and dealer after completing studies in Vienna. Awaiting further study is Oskar Pollak’s relation to Emmanuel Loewy (1857-1938), a Viennese Jewish archaeologist who studied in Vienna and served as Professor of Archaeology at the University of Rome from 1891 to 1915. All of these distinguished scholars served as exemplars for Oskar Pollak, whom Klein and Ludwig Pollak provided with valuable contacts that enabled him to remain solvent and pursue a successful career in Rome and Vienna.28 Besides providing Oskar Pollak with professional contacts and opportunities, the two older antiquarians may have assisted in the evolution of his political and cultural outlook, in particular with regard to ethnic nationalism, by which Austria was increasingly riven during Pollak’s university years. As a student at the German University of Prague from 1902-7, Pollak embraced the German cultural nationalism, as distinguished from racial Pan-Germanism, that was championed by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und 28 Of this extraordinary trio, only Ludwig Pollak is beginning to benefit from renewed scholarly attention, see Museo Barracco and Orietta Rossini, Ludwig Pollak. archaeologist and art dealer, Prague 1868 - Auschwitz 1943: the golden years of international collecting from Giovanni Barracco to Sigmund Freud, Rome: Gangemi, 2019; Margarete Merkel Guldan, Die Tagebücher von Ludwig Pollak, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988 and Ludwig Pollak, Römische Memoiren. Künstler, Kunstliebhaber und Gelehrte 1893-1943, Herausgegeben von Margarethe Merkel Guldan, Rome: <> di Bretschneider, 1994. All three books include material on Klein and Loewy, as well as Ludwig von Pastor, whose formative relationship and mentorship to Oskar Pollak may owe something to Ludwig Pollak’s influence. Ludwig Pollak lived in Rome and was married to Margarete, the older sister of Oskar Pollak’s later charge Walter Philip Goldreich von Bronneck. It may have been through this Klein-Ludwig Pollak connection that Oskar obtained the position as Walter’s tutor at Oberstudenetz in 1903. Merkel Guldan, Die Tagebücher, shows diary entries mentioning Oskar Pollak in the years 1907-15, and entries mentioning Ludwig von Pastor from the years 1902 onward. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 15 Literatur in Böhmen.29 This particular outlook was forcefully expressed in the journal Deutsche Arbeit, to which Pollak’s teachers Heinrich Alfred Schmidt30 and Ottokar Weber (although, perhaps significantly, not Wilhelm Klein) were frequent contributors.31 Pollak himself published a critique in Deutsche Arbeit of the large scale demolitions of Old Prague. Here he bemoaned the wanton destruction of old buildings and entire quarters by the Czech municipal authorities. He praised the contemporary architect Otto Wagner and his students Jan Kotĕra and Josef Zasche and disparaged Matĕj Blecha’s Mietskaserne in Pařížská ulice.32 Outside the University, Pollak frequented other outposts of German culture and Liberalism in Prague: the Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten,33 where he participated in lectures and discussions, the salon of Berta Fanta and its related regular discussion group at the Café Louvre, devoted to the philosophy of Franz Brentano. Fanta’s daughter Else, who married Pollak’s friend and classmate Hugo Bergmann, later recalled a New Year’s celebration at her parents’ home where a skit parodying Brentano’s philosophy written by Franz Kafka and Oskar Pollak was performed, with Pollak in the leading roll.34 Hugo Bergmann described the convivial comfort of Sunday afternoons at the Fanta family villa atop a hill in suburban Podbaba, with 29This organization supported Pollak’s research for his doctorate, and its successor organization in the Czechoslovak Republic underwrote the posthumous publication of his work on Roman papal artistic patronage. Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR), collection Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen, Box 39, personal file Pollak Oskar, Requests for support of scholarly research and awards, 1906. 30 Ottokar Weber, ‘Prag’, Deutsche Arbeit 8:5, Februar, 1909, 325-6, accessed through https://books.google.com/; Heinrich Alfred Schmid, ‘Über die Probleme der Kunstgeschichte’, Deutsche Arbeit 4, März 1905, 385-92, accessed through Hathitrust. 31 Two outstanding examples of the type of German Cultural Nationalism then regnant in the German University of Prague are Julius Lippert, ‘Prag, die Deutsche Stadt’, Deutsche Arbeit 8:5, Februar, 1909, 332-48, accessed through https://books.google.com/, and Philipp Knoll, Über das Deutschthum in Prag und seine augenblickliche Lage: Vortrag gehalten am 20. März 1883 im Deutschen Vereine in Prag, Prague: Verlag des Deutschen Vereines, 1883, accessed through https://books.google.com/. 32 Oskar Pollak, ‘Vom alten und vom neuen “Schönen Prag”’, Deutsche Arbeit 4:6, 1907, 385- 92, accessed through Hathitrust. 33 Stach, Kafka the Early Years, 216-217. The atmosphere of Pollak’s social life as a student in Prague is captured in Josef Čermák, ‘Das Kultur- und Vereinsleben der Prager Studenten. Die Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag’, in: Brücken: Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien-Slowakei. N.F. 9-10, 2001-2002, 107-189, accessed through https://jahrbuch- bruecken.de/category/2001-2010/. 34 Else Bergmann, ‘Familiengeschichte’, in Georg Gimpl, ed., Weil der Boden selbst hier brennt. Aus dem Prager Salon der Berta Fanta (1865-1918), Prag: Vitalis, 2000, 239. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 16 Pollak reading Boccaccio aloud in the arbor.35 And Berta Fanta herself recorded in her diary on December 16, 1904 earnest discussions at the Café Louvre between Pollak and Ernst Limė over the distinguishing of form and content in works of art.36 Pollak's study of art history at the German University of Prague had begun in 1902 under the tutelage of Alwin Schultz, a minor, now-forgotten figure at the end of a long career, active as a teacher and author of a textbook, whose scholarly work had concluded long before Pollak studied with him. A year after Schulz's retirement in 1903, the Prague chair in art history was filled by Heinrich Alfred Schmid, a Swiss student of Jacob Burckhardt and a classmate of Heinrich Wölfflin, with whom Schmid had travelled to Italy in 1886 and whose chair at Basel he took over when Wölfflin was called to Berlin in 1901.37 Pollak, from the winter semester of 1904-05 to the winter semester of 1906-07, was Schmid’s Assistent at the Art Historical Institute at the Prague German University, a relationship that brought them into close contact and involved a kind of mentorship, although Pollak emphasized in his 1913 curriculum vitae that he also studied archaeology with Wilhelm Klein at the University. Schmid was a man of broad culture with fairly narrow research interests; he published studies of Matthias Grünewald, Hans Memling, Konrad Witz and Arnold Böcklin (the latter three all Swiss-German painters). Pollak concluded his studies in Prague with Schmid, who, according to one recent assessment, ‘taught and published in a positivistic style combining historical/archeological/ archival and documentary research, as applied mainly to the art of the Northern Renaissance’.38 The German cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism of Schmid's scholarly proclivities can perhaps be discerned from the narrowness of his interests (especially in comparison with his contemporaries at the University of Vienna where Pollak later studied), and from a few hints in his published work. In his inaugural address in Prague, published in Deutsche Arbeit, he makes these extraordinary assertions: The assumption that the Gothic was a creation of Frankish stock is not far to seek; it found its realization in northern France and in the subsequent period 35 Hugo Bergmann, ‘Frau Berta Fanta (aus meinem Tagebuch. Geschrieben 18.12.1918, als ich allein mit den Toten war.)’, in Gimpl, ed., Weil der Boden selbst hier brennt, 179. 36 Berta Fanta, ‘Tagebuch’, in Gimpl, ed., Weil der Boden selbst hier brennt, 174. 37 Andrée Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 120- 124 and 182-185. Schmidt left Prague for Göttingen in 1912, and then returned to Basel in 1919 where he remained until his death in 1951. 38 Christine B. Verzar ‘After Burckhardt and Wölfflin; was there a Basel School of Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography 11, December 2014, 9. Hayum, 120, observed that Schmid, whose ‘career was eclipsed by the great pioneers of art history such as Alois Riegl,’ was ‘a thinker of keen methodological and pedagogical awareness, as well as a critic of considerable foresight and the courage of his convictions’, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/verzar.pdf. https://search.proquest.com/pubidlinkhandler/sng/pubtitle/Journal+of+Art+Historiography/$N/646362/OpenView/1638900253/$B/32DB49628388415APQ/1?accountid=14518 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 17 was best comprehended in the Germanic countries. At any rate, it is remarkable that in Italy and even in Spain we often find German architects working on Gothic buildings. It is also tempting to suggest that the originality of Italian art in the fifteenth century was due to the strong addition of German blood, which Tuscany still retained under the Hohenstaufen, an admixture which was gradually reduced and absorbed in the party struggles of the period that followed.39 Hence it appears that Schmid’s instructional methods and scholarly orientation were more heavily inflected with Teutonic ethnocentrism than were those of the Vienna art historians with whom Pollak later completed his studies. Pollak's initial sympathy with the type of German cultural nationalism that suffused the pages of Deutsche Arbeit (see footnotes 23 and 24 supra) is indicated by his youthful enthusiasm for the Kunstwart (founded by the step-nephew of Richard Wagner) and his own contribution to Deutsche Arbeit, which harshly criticizes the 39H.A. Schmid, 'Über die Probleme der Kunstgeschichte. Antrittsrede an der deutschen Universität in Prag von prof. H.A. Schmid', Deutsche Arbeit 4:6, March, 1905, accessed through https://books.google.com/, Naheliegend ist die Annahme, daß die Gotik, welche in Nordfrankreich ihre Ausbildung fand und in der Folgezeit in den germanischen Ländern am besten verstanden wurde, eine Schöpfung des fränkischen Stammes war. Auffallend ist jedenfalls auch das, daß wir in Italien und selbst in Spanien so oft gerade deutsche Architekten an gotischen Bauten beschäftigt finden. Verführerisch ist ferner die Hypothese, daß die Eigenart der italienischen Kunst im 15. Jahrhundert auf den starken Zusatz deutschen Blutes zurückzuführen ist, den Toskana noch unter den Hohenstaufen erhalten hat, ein Zusatz, der in den Parteikämpfen der Folgezeit allmählich zurückging und aufgesogen wurde. After he had left Prague, Schmid, in a 1915 wartime screed, expressed strong nationalistic views of German art, of which this example is representative: Die französische Kunstwissenschaft spricht deshalb mit einem gewissen Rechte von einer französisch-flandrischen Kunst in dieser Zeit. Aber neben vielen bedeutenden Künstlern stammen gerade die allergrössten, die wir kennen, aus den Niederlanden, und zwar nicht aus dem wallonischen Landesteil, sondern aus deutschen Gebieten, so vor allem Claus Sluter, die Brüder van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Quinten Massys, später dann auch noch Rubens und van Dyck und selbsverständlich die grossen Holländer des 17. Jahrhunderts. Dies lässt mit Sicherheit darauf schliessen, dass, so bedeutend der Anteil der Wallonen und Franzosen auch sicher gewesen ist, die ausschlaggebenden Kräfte die deutschen waren. H. A. Schmid, Deutschtum und die bildende Kunst. Rede am 22. März 1915, Berlin: Carl Heymanns Verlag, 1915, 23-24. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 18 Czech municipal authorities' wanton demolition of old buildings. Both Czech and German architects designed the garish new apartment houses that replaced the old quarters, but the only example Pollak gives was designed by a Czech. Pollak bewails the Czech authorities’ lack of appreciation for the charm and poetic Stimmung of the historic quarters of Prague, with the implicit suggestion of an inferior level of culture among the Czechs. The editor of Deutsche Arbeit was the Prague professor of German Literature August Sauer, against whom Kafka railed in one of his letters to Pollak, where he also gently chides Pollak for his unqualified adherence to the Goethe cult during a visit to Weimar.40 It is possible that Kafka's antipathy to Sauer and the strident cultural chauvinism that he represented in the Prague German milieu also subtly influenced Pollak's eventual distancing of himself from German cultural nationalism, abetted by the cosmopolitan influence of Wilhelm Klein. Pollak received his doctorate on February 8, 1907 under Schmid, historian Ottokar Weber and archaeologist Wilhelm Klein. His doctoral dissertation treated the Prague Baroque sculpture of Johann Brokoff and his son Ferdinand Maximilian. This was published in 191041; Oskar Kokoschka claimed that its publication marked the beginning of serious modern study of the Bohemian Baroque.42 During these years, the study of Renaissance and Baroque art, and especially, architecture, was a powder keg of political turmoil and rival national and ethnic claims in both the Austrian and German Empires. As early as 1880, the Viennese art critic and museum curator Albert Ilg had championed the Baroque as a supra-national architecture style, uniquely suitable for adaptation and preservation in multi- national Austria. The German Protestant Cornelius Gurlitt enraged Czech nationalist scholars and art-lovers by claiming in 1890 that the Czech nation had no 40 Stach, Kafka, the Early Years, 209-10 and 493-4. The letter is dated August 24, 1902, see, Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, New York: Schocken Books, 1958, 11-14 ; for an English translation see Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, New York, Schocken Books, 1977, 3-5. Kafka also attended Schulz’s and Schmid’s lectures in art history at the Prague German University, see Ladendorf, ‘Kafka und die Kunstgeschichte’, Wallraf-Richartz- Jahrbuch 23, 1961, 294. 41Oscar Pollak, Johann und Ferdinand Maximilian Brokoff: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der österreichischen Barockplastik, Prag, Calve, 1910, accessed through https://digitalniknihovna.mlp.cz/view/uuid:2c59efd0-0161-11dd-b6cb- 000d606f5dc6?page=uuid:43f67bc0-0163-11dd-af9f-000d606f5dc6. 42Kokoschka maintained that the Bohemian Baroque ‘was only discovered as a distinct phase in the history of art thanks to the researches of the exceptionally gifted young Viennese art- historian Dr. Oskar Pollak, a pupil of Max Dvorak (sic), killed in the first world war, and it retains its values far beyond the local cultural boundaries’, Oskar Kokoschka, ‘An Approach to the Baroque Art of Czechoslovakia’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 81:476, Nov., 1942, 264. Kokoschka appears to have been unaware of the contemporary pioneering Czech scholars of the Bohemian Baroque, like Zdeněk Wirth, who published in Czech, which Kokoschka did not read. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24656057 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 19 role in the achievements of the Bohemian Baroque, which, he claimed, was a distinctively German achievement built upon an Italian foundation43. Perhaps Pollak’s eventual devotion to documentary research was partially motivated by a desire to shift the scholarly emphasis from choleric debates about the ethnicity of artists and architects to the discovery of the facts of patronage, chronology and design. In September, 1907, Pollak went to Rome with a travel grant from the Austrian Ministry of Cult and Instruction, and from November, 1907 to October 1910 he remained in Rome studying Italian Baroque art as a member of the Austrian Historical Institute, at that time on the second floor of via della Croce 74. He returned to the Institute in Rome frequently for shorter research stays, while assisting in cataloging the Institute’s library collections, up until the war’s outbreak in August, 1914.44 The years in Rome brought him into close contact with the Institute’s director Ludwig von Pastor, an ardent Austrian patriot and a magisterial scholar of super-human energy, with whom Pollak developed an especially close relationship. Inevitably, in these surroundings, Pollak began to lose his provincial outlook, and his German cultural nationalism diminished.45 Indeed, surviving documents from these years suggest, in miniscule details, that Pollak’s earlier infatuation with German cultural nationalism gave way to Austrian liberal supranationalism. When he published his doctoral dissertation as a book in 1910, he changed its sub-title from ‘Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen’46 to 43 Rampley, Vienna School, 96-115; Cornelius Gurlitt, ‘Die Barockarchitektur in Böhmen’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen 28, 1890, 1-16, accessed through https://books.google.com/, and Evonne Levy, Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845 - 1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr, Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2015, 172-243. 44 Archiv des Österreichischen Historischen Instituts, Rome, ‘Dr Oskar Pollak, Qualifikations- Beschreibung, 1914’ (29 Mai 1914). 45 This process of establishing distance from strident German cultural nationalism very likely began earlier under the influence of Wilhelm Klein, who crossed the Czech-German divide to cultivate warm relationships with Czech artists and colleagues, notably the pre-eminent Czech sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek; see Jan Bouzek, ‘Wilhelm Klein und die Prager Archäologie’, Walter Pape, ed., Zehn Jahre Universitätspartnerschaft Univerzita Karlova v Praze – Universität zu Köln: Kolloquium zur Universitäts- und Fachgeschichte, Köln: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 2011 (ebook), 123-134, accessed through https://kups.ub.uni- koeln.de/3322/. Ludwig Pollak provided another example of this more cosmopolitan, supra- national outlook, in his close relations with Czech and German stipendistas in Rome (artists, architect and scholars), see Pollak, Römische Memoiren, chapters III (Bildende Künstler und Architekten) 61-88, and IV (Die Gelehrtern Kreise) 89-120. 46‘Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Barockplastik’, is the sub-title listed in the register of doctoral dissertation defenses at the Prague German University (Archive of the Charles University, collection Registry books of the German University in Prague, inventory No. 3, Registry book of doctors of the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague/German University in Prague (1904–1924), page 61, accessed through Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 20 ‘österreichischen Barockplastik’ (figs 5, 6 and 7). These seemingly insignificant minutiae exemplify the kind of fraught distinctions, so bewildering to non-natives, which have often preoccupied Central Europeans47. The degree to which they were taken seriously is illustrated in a 1912 mostly positive review of Pollak’s Brokoff monograph by the Czech museologist Karel Guth, who commented, ‘How to understand the words “Austrian Baroque”? In terms of nationality, “German Baroque” would answer, not entirely accurately; topographically one would have to use the term “Czech”. “Austrian Baroque” is however in any case an historical absurdity’.48 Figure 5 Archive of the Charles University, Registry book of doctors of the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague (1904–1924), page 61: Dissertation subtitled ‘Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte der deutschen Barockplastik’ http://is.cuni.cz/webapps/archiv/public/book/bo/1971898055542710/65/?lang=en#, and in Pollak’s correspondence with the Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen, (Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR), collection Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen, Box 39, personal file Pollak Oskar, Requests for support of scholarly research and awards, 1906), which provided him with stipends to cover various expenses related to his research, including the commissioning of photographs. 47 A recent example is the pomlčková válka (hyphen war) of 1989 in Czechoslovakia. 48 Karel Guth, 'Review of Oskar Pollak, Johann und Ferdinand Maximilian Brokoff. Ein Beitrag zu Geschichte der österreichischen Barockplastik, Prague, 1910, and Studien zur Geschichte der Architektur Prags 1520-1600. Pollak, Oskar. Wien - Leipzig, 1910. (Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses. (Bd. 29. nr. 2), 85-170’, Český časopis historický 18:1, 1912, 94-100; 96: ‘Co rozumí slovy „rakouský barok"? Nacionálně odpovídal by tomu — ač ne zcela správně — „německý barok", topograficky by pak musil užíti označení „český”. „Rakouský barok" však je v každém případě historické absurdum’, accessed through http://www.digitalniknihovna.cz/knav/. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 21 Figure 6 Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, collection Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen, Box 39, personal file Pollak Oskar, Requests for support of scholarly research and awards 1906) Dissertation subtitled ‘Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte der deutschen Barockplastik’ Figure 7 Title page of Pollak’s Brokoff 1910 monograph based upon his 1907 Doctoral dissertation Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 22 Resistance to art historical nationalism likewise characterized Pollak's University of Vienna Habilitationsschrift, on the Renaissance architecture of Prague during the years 1520-1600, as Karel Guth, who assessed both dissertations in the same 1912 review, noted approvingly. Guth praised Pollak’s study of Prague Renaissance architecture for putting to rest the myth of the ‘German Renaissance’ domination of architecture in post-medieval Prague and Central Europe. Pollak refuted this myth, aggressively promulgated by Cornelius Gurlitt during the full flower of Prussian nationalism, by revealing the heavy reliance on Italian illustrated books (primarily Serlio) in many major monuments, and the post-Reformation influx of Italian masons followed by Netherlandish artists and builders during the Rudolfine era..49 49 Karel Guth, ‘Review of Pollak’, 90: Práce Pollakova, řadící chronologicky jednotlivé památky, osvětuje aspoň pro Prahu dosud téměř neznámou dobu českého umění. Dosavadní názor, že do Rudolfovy doby vládne ‘česká’ renaissance a po té ‘německá’, je tím vyvrácen. Od r. 1537. event. 1535. přicházejí neustále do Prahy italští umělci, kteří přinášejí italskou renaissanci a užívají italských předloh architektonických. Tento příliv nemizí však ani po celé 17. stol. V době Rudolfově přichází nový proud umělecký z Nizozemí. A právě na účet tohoto nizozemského vlivu vznikla tradice o ‘německé’ renaissanci, jež má stejně neexistující podklad jako ‘česká’ renaissance. Zjištění těchto dvou různých vlivů, italského a nizozemského, stopování jich působení o sobě i navzájem je zásluhou práce Pollakovy. Pollak's work, which sorts individual monuments chronologically, illuminates an unknown (at least for Prague) period of Czech art. The current opinion that until Rudolf's reign the ‘Czech’ Renaissance and then the ‘German’ held sway is thus refuted. Since 1537, and perhaps as early as 1535, Italian artists arrive who bring the Italian Renaissance and use Italian architectural models. This tide, however, does not disappear throughout the entire seventeenth century. During Rudolph’s reign, a new artistic stream came from the Netherlands. And it is this Netherlandish influence that created the tradition of the ‘German’ Renaissance, which has the same non-existent basis as the ‘Czech’ Renaissance. The ascertaining of these two different influences, the Italian and the Netherlandish, the tracing of their effects on themselves and on each other is the merit of Pollak’ study. In 1995, Emanuel Poche praised Pollak for ‘his rejection of the prevailing tendentious emphasis on German influence, which attests to his character as a responsible and objective scholar’ [‘odmítl dosavadní tendenční zdůrazňování nĕmeckých vlivů, což svĕdčí o jeho vĕdecké objektivitĕ a odpovĕdnosti’.] ‘Pollak, Oskar’, Nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění, Prague: Academia, 1995, 632. Pollak’s close study of Gurlitt’s 1887 book, Geschichte des barockstiles in Italien is apparent from his 42 pages of closely written notes in Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar, Box II, ‘Auszüge zu Gurlitt’. https://uconn.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=283&queryString=ti%3DGeschichte%20des%20barockstiles%20in%20Italien%20 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 23 In Rome at the Istituto storico austriaco, Pollak began a project to illustrate the development of art in Rome under Popes Urban VIII, Innocent X and Alexander VII (1623-67) with a full collection of all the important original documents. He began collecting and studying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Roman guidebooks; both efforts occupied him to the end of his life. He published a growing number of scholarly articles, and supplemented his stipend by an astounding sixty-two contributions to Thieme and Becker’s Allgemeines Künstlerlexicon. These included a twelve-page one on Pietro da Cortona, which shocked with its length Hermann Voss, later appointed by Hitler to replace the deceased Herrmann Posse at the Führer Museum in Linz.50 From November 1910 through Spring 1913 Pollak was Max Dvořák's Assistent at the Art History Institute at the University of Vienna; close collaboration with Dvořák, who was Czech, surely reinforced the supranational and cosmopolitan sympathies that Pollak had cultivated under Pastor’s, Klein’s and Ludwig Pollak’s tutelage51. His Vienna studies were interspersed with research stays in Rome at the Austrian Historical Institute. From May through November 1911 he volunteered at the Österreichische Museum für Kunst und Industrie, working on the new permanent exhibition and cataloging ceramics52. When in residence in Vienna, he gave talks and cycles of public lectures in University extension courses.53 He 50 Hermann Voss, ‘Review of Ulrich Thieme, Aligemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Begründet von Ulrich Thieme und Felix Becker. Leipzig, E. A. Seemann. Bd. VI: Carlini—Cioci. Bd. VII: Cioffi—Cousyns’, Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe N.F. 24: 23, 7. März 1913, 326-327: ‘Dem Pietro da Cortona aber widmet O. Pollak gar einen Artikel, der 22½ Spalten einnimmt, Dimensionen, die meines Erachtens nicht einmal bei Michelangelo, Raffael oder Rembrandt berechtigt wären. Dabei liest man mit Staunen auf S. 494, der Verfasser habe sich auf die Besprechung der völlig sicheren Werke seines Künstlers beschränkt!‘. 51 The appointment of Dvořák, a Czech from Roudnice in central Bohemia, in 1905 as Alois Riegl’s replacement in Vienna, occasioned vitriolic attacks from German nationalist academics, politicians and journalists. This trauma, and the spirited defense he received from supranational Austrian patriots, confirmed Dvořák’s lasting sympathies with the anti- Strzygowski faction in Vienna; he even turned down an offer of a Chair in Art History at the Czech University in Prague after the 1918 creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, preferring to remain in his post in Vienna; see Rampley, Vienna School, 5, 54-55, 65-66 and 213-14. For discussion of an earlier struggle of Dvořák’s with Czech academic provincialism and parochialism, see Jindřich Vybíral, ‘Why Max Dvořák did not become a Professor in Prague’, Journal of Art Historiography 17, December, 2017, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/vybiral.pdf. 52 Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien, Aktenarchiv - 1911-10 (report from Pollak dated October, 1911, and Aktenarchiv - 1911-10/3 (for two letters to a museum official (perhaps the director, Hofrat Eduard Leisching) from Pollak from Rome, dated April 27 and May 3, 1911). 53 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Rektoratsarchive – Akademischer Senat – Personalblätter (19.-20. Jh), Pollak 2908(fols 3R and 3V-Beilage 5): ‘In den letzten drei Jahren hatte ich auch Gelegenheit mich als öffentlichen Vortragenden zu bestättigen, u.a. in den https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kunstchronik1913/0167 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 24 published and lectured about contemporary art and architecture during the same period.54 He was in residence at the Institute in Rome with a stipend in Spring 1913 and as the Institute’s Art Historical Assistant in February 1914. During that time he prepared for publication his massive collection of documents related to art under Urban VIII. In August, 1914 he returned to Vienna to enlist. He was named a Privatdozent in Vienna in December, 1914.55 When Pollak began studying in the Vienna Institute of Art History in 1910, he encountered a political and cultural configuration that was familiar. The historical profile of the Vienna Institute of Art History corresponds closely to that of the community of emancipated German Jews of Prague. Both had their origins in the failed Revolution of 1848. Both were heavily invested in Liberalism and the attempt to harmonize ethnic and national divisions within a broad Austrian patriotism. In fact the wider conflict between Liberal supranational, cosmopolitan Austrian patriots and virulent Nationalists was paralleled by the schism within the Vienna Art Historical Institute, where, as has been described, Riegl and Wickoff (and later Dvořák and Schlosser) faced off against Josef Strzygowski. Pollak himself seems to have run afoul of Strzygowski at the defense for his Habilitation on June 28, 1913, as the dissenting report by Strzygowski shows. Strzygowski chastised Pollak for not being familiar with some medieval and Byzantine objects and for having knowledge of no other methods of connoisseurship than those of Morelli. His assent to Pollak’s Habilitation was contingent on Pollak’s venia legendi being limited to the history of modern art, and not extended to art history in general.56 Vortragzyklen, die ich im Auftrage der volkstümlichen Universitätskurse abgehalten habe.’ In his Nachlass there are notes for a lecture on Nineteenth-Century architecture (‘Geschichte der Architektur im XIX Jahrhundert; II. Von 1850 bis zur neuesten Zeit’ delivered each Thursday at 7:30 in the evening from 20 February 1913 at the Anatomisches Institut, Währingerstrasse 13, Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar, Box 6. 54Oskar Pollak,'Die Internationale Kunstausstellung in Rom 1911. Mit 32 Abbildungen und 1 Dreifarbendruck', Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 46 [=N.F. 22]:12, 1911, 273-96; Oskar Pollak, 'Ausstellung Österreichischer Kunstgewerbe 1911 bis 1912 im k. k. Österreichischen Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Wien', Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe N.F. 23, February, 16, 1912, 250-252, as well as many short notices, ‘letters from Vienna’, exhibition and museum installation reviews in Kunstchronik during his last years in Vienna signed ‘O.P.’: e.g. NF 23:25, 26 April 1912. 385-92, [‘Wiener Brief’], NF 24:2, 11 Oktober 1912, 27-30 [‘Austellungen’] and NF24:37, 13. Juni 1913, 538-543 [‘Wiener Brief’]. 55 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Rektoratsarchive – Akademischer Senat – Personalblätter (19.-20. Jh), Pollak 2908; this includes Pollak’s curriculum vitae (fols 3R, 3V and 4R-Beilage 5) and documents related to his appointment as Privatdozent (28R and 33R). 56 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Rektoratsarchive – Akademischer Senat – Personalblätter (19.-20. Jh), Pollak 2908, fol.23r: Hofrat Strzygowski erklärt zu Protokoll: Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 25 It is possible that his experiences as a German-speaking Jew in Prague at the fin-de-siecle predisposed Pollak to sympathize with and embrace the ideals and goals of the anti-Strzygowski faction of the Vienna School. The schism within the Vienna University Institute of Art History, which pitted Wickhoff and Riegl (and later Dvořák and Julius von Schlosser) against Strzygowski began early and ran deep. Long before Strzygowski’s arrival in Vienna to replace the deceased Wickhoff in 1909, the arch-Liberals and Austrian patriots Wickhoff and Riegl and the rabidly anti-Habsburg Pan-Germanist Strzygowski had published scathing reviews of each other’s work. The schism was concretized in 1912, when Strzygowski secured permission to establish his own rival institute within the University.57 Pollak’s native community of Prague Jews had clung to Liberalism even after it had been rejected by many Czech and German nationalists.58 The Czechs in Prague were numerically superior and their rising national consciousness and cultural aspirations found articulate expression in literature, theatre and Czech-language schools. Jews thus occupied a tense and precarious position between Czechs and Germans. German-speaking Jews in Prague cultivated German Bildung and the Goethe cult, German classical music and German theatre59, which antagonized Dr. Pollak beherrscht, wie das Koloqium beim Unterzeichneten und Prof. v. Schlosser gezeigt hat, das Fach der Kunstgeschichte nicht in den Masse, dass man ihn die Venia für das Gesamtfach der neueren Kunstgeschichte verleihen könnte. Er weiss nichts von der Literatur über die ravennatischen Sarkophage, kennt das Kästchen von Pirano im Hof-museum nicht und Weiss für seine Uebungen über die Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Betrachtungsmethode nur die Methode Morelli anzuführen. Wenn Prof. v. Schlosser auch Sinnesverwirrung geltend macht, und der Unterzeichnete anerkennt, dass Pollak den Baldinucci und die Quellen des Vasari kennen müsse—die er Tatsächlich nicht zu nennen wusste—so kann er unter Berücksichtigung der guten Arbeiten des Habilitanten doch nur für seine Venia im Gebiete der Kunstgeschichte der Neuzeit eintreten. Unter dieser Einschränkung hat er sich für die Zulesung ausgesprochen. SIGNED: ‘Strzygowski’. 57 Marchand, 'Appreciating the Art of Others’, 278. Schlosser’s 1934 history of the Vienna School of Art History does not even mention Strzygowski: Julius von Schlosser, ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte‘, Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institut für Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungs-Band 13, Heft 2, Innsbruck: Wagner 1934, and English translation by Karl Johns [‘Julius von Schlosser, The Vienna school of the history of art - review of a century of Austrian scholarship in German1 Translated and edited by Karl Johns’, Journal of Art Historiography 1, December 2009, accessed through https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/karl-johns-schlosser-trans- wienerschule-revised.pdf. 58 For the durability of Liberalism in Late Imperial Austria, see Pieter Judson, The Habsburg empire: a new history, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2016 and ‘Rethinking The Liberal Legacy’, in Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna, 1900, New York: Berghahn, 2001, 57-79. 59 According to Marsha Rozenblit, Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 26 Czech nationalists, who responded with scorn. German university students from the border regions rioted and demonstrated against Czechs and Jews. In a kind of antiphonal chorus, both national groups menaced the Jews with economic boycotts, relentless vilification and incitement in the press, vandalism and even physical violence. If Pollak is remembered primarily for his archival and documentary compilations, he also produced a body of work deeply engaged with analyzing and interpreting works of art and architecture. His 1910 monograph on the Prague Baroque sculptors Johann and Ferdinand Maximilian Brokoff was based on his Prague dissertation, and the Czech art historians Oldřich Blažíček and Emmanuel Poche still considered it quite useful many decades later.60 The Brokoff monograph’s historical importance and high quality were recently praised by the Czech authors of a 2017 study of the Marian column on the Hradčany Square.61 The published When Jews adopted German culture in Austria…they did not consider themselves Germans in the same way as most Germans understood that term. That is, Jews who spoke German, loved German literature, and assumed the superiority of German culture regarded themselves as culturally German, as members of the German Kulturnation, but not as members of the German Volk, the German people. Such a cultural definition of Germanness, therefore, left room for them to identify ethnically as Jews. Marsha L. Rozenblit, ‘The Dilemma of National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria in World War I’, in Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities In East Central Europe, New York: Berghahn, 2005, 150. For the relationship of Bildung to the emancipation and assimilation of German Jews, and its relation to the creation of a distinctively German Jewish identity, see David Sorkin, ‘The impact of emancipation on German Jewry: a reconsideration’, in Jonathan Frankel and Stephen J. Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 177-99. 60 Oldřich J. Blažíček, Ferdinand Brokof, Prague: Odeon, 1976, 19: ‘…monografi[e] O. Pollaka, práci ...jejíž závĕry jsou dosud užitečné’; Emanuel Poche, ‘Pollak, Oskar’, Nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění, Prague: Academia, 1995, 632. 61 Kateřina Adamcová, and Pavel Zahradník Mariánský sloup na Hradčanském náměstí, Prague, Karolinum Press, 2017, 15: Oskar Pollak published his monographic study of the life and work of Ferdinand Maximilian Brokoff and his father Jan Brokoff in 1910. In this relatively slender, but nevertheless very carefully researched publication he not only included all that was hitherto known about the life and work of both sculptors, but also made the first attempt to distinguish and characterize their individual contributions to the joint productions of the atelier. Oskar Pollak publikoval svou monografickou studii o životĕ a díle Ferdinada Maximiliana Brokoffa a jeho otce Jana Brokoffa v roce 1910, V této relativnĕ útlé, Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 27 version of his Habilitationschrift, a study of Prague architecture from 1520 to 1600, is a model of careful observation and thoughtful interpretation of individual monuments, still cited in studies of the period. He wrote articles about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the work of Borromini, Pietro and Gianlorenzo Bernini, Algardi, Antonio del Grande and Pietro da Cortona and published in scholarly journals collections of documents that he had discovered in archives. His direct engagement with monuments and art objects is apparent from the descriptions, drawings (figs 8 and 9) and analyses preserved in his Nachlass.62 His premature death at the front accounts in part for the preponderance of documentary studies in his published books and articles; his most ambitious projects, like his monographic studies of Borromini and Otto Wagner, were planned but never completed.63 These would have combined his archival discoveries with formal, stylistic, historical and ‘developmental’ analyses. Figure 8 Pollak’s sketch of the vault of the Re Magi chapel in Collegio di Propaganda Fide, Rome, Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar přesto velmi pečlivĕ zpracované publikaci nejenže shrnul všechny dosud známé poznatky o životĕ a díle obou autorů, ale také se jako první pokusil vymezit a characterisovat úlohu obou sochařů ve společné produkci ateliéru. 62 Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar. 63 Tietze, ‘† Oskar Pollak,’ 490-91. At the end of Fritz Hoeber, Peter Behrens, München: Müller und Rentsch, 1913, the first volume of a series called ‘Moderne Architekten', a forthcoming title is listed: Otto Wagner von Dr-Oskar Pollak assistent a.d. Univ.Wien, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/hoeber1913/0269/image. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 28 Figure 9 Pollak’s sketch of the entrance portal to the sacristy, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar Pollak’s large archive of unpublished material, a sizeable portion of which was later deposited at the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna, was plundered or exploited, sometimes without attribution, and manipulated in various ways by scholars in the 1920s and ‘30s. Ludwig Schudt, the first librarian of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, edited for publication the copious material that Pollak had collected on Roman guide books. Arnold Witte and his students Eva van Kemenade, Niels Graaf and Joelle Terburg, by comparing Schudt’s text with the notes written by Pollak inside guidebooks collected by him and on note cards, demonstrate that Schudt often repeated Pollak’s observations verbatim, without attribution.64 Dagobert Frey, whom Andrew Hopkins has described as a ‘Nachlass- profiteer’,65 was given access to the archive by Pollak’s widow Hedwig Eisner Pollak, with the understanding that he would prepare for publication the archival 64 Arnold Witte, Eva van Kemenade, Niels Graaf, Joëlle Terburg, 'Codifying the Genre of Early Modern Guidebooks: Oskar Pollak, Ludwig Schudt and the Creation of Le Guide Di Roma (1930)', in A. Blennow, & S. Fogelberg Rota, eds., Rome and The Guidebook Tradition: From the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, Berlin: De Gruyter, 313-338, accessed through https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110615630-009. I am deeply grateful to Arno Witte for sharing with me the proofs of this study prior to publication. 65 Andrew Hopkins, ‘Riegl Renaissances’, in Alois Riegl and Alina Alexandra Payne, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010, 65. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 29 documents related to the artistic patronage of Urban VIII and the fabbrica of St. Peter’s. Frey did not publish the two parts until 1928 and 1931, making sure to publish first his own study of Roman Baroque architecture in 1924. According to Hopkins, Frey’s decision to write this essay was based on privileged access to Pollak’s unpublished Nachlass, and was in large part constructed around documents found in the Vatican archives and transcribed by Pollak. Frey later gained notoriety, and never incurred the least punishment, by providing expert guidance to the Gestapo in the thorough looting of Polish art treasures to be transported to the Reich. With Frey’s guidance, they looted Wawel Castle in Kraków, even ripping the chimneypieces from the walls. Strenge Kunstwissenschaft, indeed. Frey avoided punishment and died in 1962 in Stuttgart, where he had continued teaching after the war.66 Pollak’s dedication to documentary and archival research, deeply influenced by the peerless example of Ludwig von Pastor, can be interpreted as a doubling down, an ecclesia militans, as it were, against Strzygowski’s insistence on the exclusive primacy of objects. It can be understood as the party of the Quellen vs. the party of the objects and non-verbal evidence, a sort of art-historical Blues and Greens. For Pollak, as a German-speaking Jew from Prague, the cultural traditions that Josef Strzygowski sought to undermine and discredit did not merely constitute a position in a methodological dispute among scholars, but were the components that formed the very core of his identity and that of the embattled minority to which he belonged. For Bildung had largely replaced traditional religious observance as the source of cohesion among assimilated Jews in Prague and other cities of Austria- Hungary. Pollak’s discoveries and compilations of archival documents and primary sources are the achievements for which he is still remembered by a few specialists and for which he was most esteemed at the time of his death. Focusing on his dedication to documentary research helps to situate Pollak within the cultural politics of Late Imperial Austria. Yet Pollak’s strong affinity with the anti- Strzygowski wing of the Vienna School of Art History can also be discerned in the other lines of inquiry he pursued in his published and unpublished scholarly work. Judging from his monthly reports on his work in Rome in the Istituto storico austraiaco archive67 and the manuscripts in his Nachlass, the centerpiece of his archival and documentary research appears to have been a monographic study of 66 Juliane Marquard-Twarowski, 'Ex Libris Dr. Dagobert Frey: Beobachtungen Zur "kunstgeschichtlichen Ostforschung"', in Magdalena Bushart, Agnieszka Gasior, Alena Janatková, eds., Kunstgeschichte in den besetzten Gebieten 1939-1945, Köln: DeGruyter, 2016, 221-237, which includes a comprehensive bibliography on the full extent of Frey’s villainy during the Nazi era. 67 Archiv des Österreichischen Historischen Instituts, Rome, I.5, Mitgliederverzeichnis 1890/1–1908/ 9 (Mit Arbeitsthemen): ‘1907/08: Pollak dr. Oskar (5 Monate – 1. November 1907 – Ende März 1908. Danach bis Ende Juni als a.o. Mitgl. Borromini / Künst-Bibliographie Roms / Rom (Umbrien).’ and Berichte 1909/10–13/14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Magdalena+Bushart&text=Magdalena+Bushart&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2?ie=UTF8&field-author=Agnieszka+Gasior&text=Agnieszka+Gasior&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_3?ie=UTF8&field-author=Alena+Janatkov%C3%A1+%28Hrsg.%29&text=Alena+Janatkov%C3%A1+%28Hrsg.%29&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de https://www.amazon.de/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_3?ie=UTF8&field-author=Alena+Janatkov%C3%A1+%28Hrsg.%29&text=Alena+Janatkov%C3%A1+%28Hrsg.%29&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-de Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 30 Borromini, never completed but surviving in fragments. The reports also provide details of his preparation of studies of Roman guide books and of his compilation of archival sources for Roman papal art in the years 1623-1670. He also made notes for a study of the Roman diaries and correspondence of Nicolas-Albert (Mikołaj Wojciech) Gniewosz de Olexow, Polish Bishop of Włocławek in the years 1641-54, earlier the Polish ambassador to the courts of Brussels and Paris.68 The form these unrealized projects were intended to take is suggested by several of his scholarly articles and by his 1910 Habilitationsschrift. His 1909 article on Antonio del Grande employs documents found in the Doria-Pamphily and Colonna archives (access to which was arranged for Pollak by Ludwig von Pastor)69 to ‘clarify a portion of the development [italics added] of Roman architecture in the second half of the seventeenth century’.70 Pollak situates del Grande within a conservative, classicizing tradition that extends from Giacomo della Porta and G.B. Soria through Bernini to Carlo Fontana and Galilei. Pollak recognizes the opposition of this tradition to that of Maderno and Borromini, from which he traces, via Andrea Pozzo, the further development of architecture to Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, the Dientzenhofers and Balthasar Neumann, albeit with no mention of Guarini. He even sees this antipode reflected in the opposition between J.B. Fischer von Erlach’s classicism in Vienna and the work of Italian architects who were followers of Borromini.71 In his study of Prague architecture from 1520 to 1600, Pollak sought to 68 Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar, Box 5. 69 Archiv des Österreichischen Historischen Instituts, Rome, Bericht über den Monat Mai 1909: ‘…durch die gütige Vermittelung des Herrn Hofrats L. von Pastor … der Zutritt zu den Archive des Fürsten Doria-Pamphili gestattet wurde…’. 70 Oskar Pollak, 'Antonio Del Grande, ein unbekannter römischer Architekt des 17. Jahrhunderts', Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K[aiserlich-]K[öniglichen] Zentral- Kommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und Historischen Denkmale 3:1909, 134, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/kjbzk1909/0180/image. 71 Pollak, ‘Antonio del Grande,’ 160-161: Grande ist eben ein Musterbeispiel jener konservativen Richtung der Seicentoarchitektur in Rom, deren Haupt Bernini war: ‚Konservativ‘ nenne ich sie (‚klassizistisch‘ wäre zu viel gesagt), weil sie das Erbe der Giacomo della Porta und Soria, jenes ‚schweren‘ römischen Barockstiles übernahmen und weiterbildeten. Bernini selbst, der im Anfänge sich von Maderna und Boromini hatte beeinflussen lassen, drückt eigentlich erst in seiner späteren Zeit ähnliche Absichten deutlich aus: das Hauptwerk dieser Zeit sind die Kolonnaden von St. Peter. Grande dagegen, der offenbar einer jüngeren Generation als Bernini angehört, geht von allem Anfang an jenen strengen entsagenden Weg, der über die Kunst des Carlo Fontana zum Klassizismus eines Galilei führt. Der Gegenpol dieser auf der Tradition beruhenden Kunst ist Boromini, der nur einen Meister anerkennt: Michelangelo. Bedeutet dieser den Bruch mit der Tradition Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 31 trace the development of architecture over a specific chronological span, the last decade of which he describes as ‘a time of ferment, when a new style arose, and the old one, dying, was fiercely fighting for its life’.72 In 1911, Pollak published a study of Borromini’s ceiling decorations for the Palazzo Falconieri in Rome (1646f.), which he regarded as ‘only an intermediate stage of a continuous development’73 between the sacristy vaults at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-41), and the ceiling decorations in the Collegio della Propaganda Fide (1650s). In the same article, Pollak describes the austere and forbidding Roman palace street facades of the Tridentine and Post-Tridentine era, which masked sumptuous decoration in the courtyards and on the garden facades of the same palaces. With the later Palazzo Barberini, street facades on Roman palaces grew increasingly sumptuous in their ornament, and courtyards diminished in importance as foci of architectural display.74 Pollak sought to trace lines of development within an individual artist’s oeuvre as well as in within the chronological and geographic boundaries of a style or epoch. He observes a greater plasticity and vitality in the architectural forms and ornament of Borromini’s later der Renaissance, so bedeutet Boromini den Bruch mit dem römischen Barock. Beide haben in Italien, das, als romanisches Land wie Frankreich, wenig dem absoluten Subjektivismus hold war, nicht allzu viele Nachfolger gefunden. Um so begieriger griff der immer individualistisch veranlagte deutsche Norden die neuen Ideen auf und ein Pozzo war der Mittler zu jener Kunst eines Hildebrand, der Dientzenhofer, des Neumann, die im österreichischen und süddeutschen Rokoko ihre letzte Blüte finden sollte. Aber auch jene strengrömische ‚struktive‘ Architektur des Bernini und seiner Nachfolger hat im Norden ihre Nachfolge gefunden, unter anderem in der Kunst des Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Wie in Rom der Kampf des Bernini gegen Boromini, so fand später in Wien der Kampf Fischers gegen jene italienischen Architekten statt, die auf Borominis Bahnen gingen. 72 Pollak, ‘Studien zur Geschichte’, 170: Das letzte Jahrzehnt des XVI. Jahrhunderts war für Prag eine Zeit der Gärung, da ein neuer Stil entstand und der alte, absterbende sich heftig seines Lebens wehrte. Daher wird es schwer, den leitenden Faden zu finden, der zur Klarheit über die Entwicklung führt. Und diese Klarheit wird nur der finden können, der von der Bauentwicklung der ersten Hälfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts rückschauend die Quellen dieser Entwicklung sucht. In diesem letzten Jahrzehnt der Gärung wird er sie finden und wird dann entscheiden können, welche von ihnen lebensfähig waren und welche nach kurzem Laufe versandeten. Uns muß es in diesem Rahmen genügen, sie isoliert gezeigt zu haben. 73 Oskar Pollak, ‘Die Decken des Palazzo Falconieri in Rom und Zeichnungen von Boromini in der Wiener Hofbibliothek’, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Institutes 5:1911, 122: ‘nur…eine Zwischenstufe einer fortlaufenden Entwicklung’, accessed through https://digi.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/diglit/jbki. 74 Pollak, ‘Die Decken des Palazzo Falconieri’, 126-130. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 32 work, and maintains that ‘in all of Borromini’s works a clear and consequential development can be traced.’75 Throughout his published work, these considerations of stylistic development or evolution recur like cadenzas. While he never approaches stylistic or artistic development in a mechanistic or deterministic way,76 his investment in the study of artistic evolution, which he shared with Riegl and Tietze, may be indebted to his life-long interest in Darwin, manifest already in his school days.77 75 Pollak, ‘Die Decken des Palazzo Falconieri’, 141: ‘in allen Werken des Boromini eine klare und konsequente Entwicklung verfolgbar ist’. 76 In Oskar Pollak ,‘Alessandro Algardi (1602—1654) als Architekt’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur 4:1910/11, 69, the façade of Sant’ Ignazio is described thus: Entwicklungsgeschichtlich steht diese Fassade noch nicht einmal auf der Stufe von Madernas Fassade von S. Susanna, trotzdem diese fast ein halbes Jahrhundert früher (1603) entstanden war. Um ganz die Rückständigkeit dieses Werkes zu ermessen, bedenke man, daß um 1640 Boromini und Bernini in der Blüte ihrer Tätigkeit standen! In terms of historical development, this facade is not even on the level of Maderna's facade of S. Susanna, although it was built almost half a century earlier (1603) [than Sant’Ignazio]. To fully measure the backwardness of this work, consider that around 1640 Borromini and Bernini were in the full flower of their activity! Accessed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/zga. 77 Hugo Bergmann, in his obituary for Pollak cited in footnote 19, recalled a memorable demonstration by Pollak of his early enthusiasm for Darwin: Pollak's first appearance as a "scientist" characterizes him well. It was 1900 in the Septima [the penultimate year of Gymnasium] of the Altstädter Gymnasium [Old Town German High School]. We had to give our speeches, on more or less official topics at that time, which interested neither the speaker nor the audience. Pollak chose Darwinism as his subject. Häckel's Riddle of the Universe had just appeared, a revelation to us Septimans [students in the penultimate year of Gymnasium]. (Who wouldn't have been an atheist as a Septiman?) Pollak set about the lecture with all the thoroughness of which he was capable. That afternoon when he was supposed to present it, he covered all the blackboards with the drawings that were to illustrate the basic biogenetic law. Then the professor appeared in the class and announced that the lecture had been forbidden at the eleventh hour. Pollak went back to his seat with that self-confident ironic smile that was the best answer to the narrow-minded ban. He was undoubtedly the most talented and intellectually lively among us high school students. Pollaks erstes Auftreten als "Wissenschaftler" charakterisiert ihn gut. Es war 1900 in der Septima des Altstadter Gymnasiums. Wir hatten unsere Redeübungen zu halten, damals noch mehr oder weniger offizielle Themen, die weder den Redenden noch die Zuhörer interressierten. Pollak wählte sich zu seinem Thema den Darwinismus. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/zga1910_1911 Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 33 Pollak planned similar developmental or evolutionary studies, on a much grander scale, of Italian Architecture from 1580 to 1670, divided into thirty-year spans or generations,78 and of Baroque art in Bohemia, divided according to the reign of each emperor.79 His Nachlass contains copious notes, texts of lectures and drafts of chapters related to these works in progress. These projects were in addition to his planned monographs on Borromini, Otto Wagner and Pietro da Cortona, the projected hefty publications on Roman topographical and guide-book literature and on the documents related to the art patronage of Popes Urban VIII, Innocent X and Alexander VII. Pollak’s projected and completed works of scholarship can partly be understood as an attempt to subject Cornelius Gurlitt’s object of study – the Renaissance and Baroque in Italy and Northern Europe – to Vienna School treatment, as represented by the examples of Wickhoff, Riegl, Dvořák and Tietze. In this too he appears to have found an exemplar in Riegl; Evonne Levy has written that Alois Riegl read Gurlitt’s volumes on Italian and German Baroque and relied on them heavily in preparing his first lecture courses on European baroque art and architecture in the 1890s. In both the lectures on Italy, published posthumously by his colleagues as Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, and the unpublished lectures on the German Baroque, he regarded Gurlitt’s volumes as repositories of dates and names but cautioned that anyone seeking a clear definition of the character of baroque style, or the continuous line of its development [italics added], would be disappointed: Gurlitt presupposes that the reader is knowledgeable about the Baroque and does not offer a clearly defined account of it.80 Pollak seems to have aspired to place Gurlitt’s subject on a new footing by purging it of chauvinistic nationalism and using documentary research as the basis for an ambitious study of the development and evolution of the Baroque. A more recent formulation of this latter task, applied to the history of art in general and not limited Es waren gerade Häckels Welträtsel erschienen, uns Septimanern eine Offenbarung. (Wer wäre als Septimaner nicht Atheist gewesen?) Pollak machte sich an den Vortrag mit all der Gründlichkeit, deren er fähig war. An jenem Nachmittag, da er ihn halten sollte, bedeckte er alle Tafeln mit den Zeichnungen, die das biogenitische Grundgesetz illustrieren sollten. Da erscheint de Professor in der Klasse und verkündet, dass der Vortrag in letzter Stunde verboten worden sei. Pollak ging in seinen Bank mit jenem selbst bewussten ironischen Lächeln, das die beste Antwort auf das engherzige Verbot war.Unter uns Gymnasiasten war er zweifellos der begabeste und geistig regsamste. 78 Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar, Box 2. 79 Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar, Boxes 2 and 4. 80 Levy, 229-230 and 243. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 34 to the Baroque, can be found in Otto Pächt’s forceful and lucid The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method.81 Nor is an interest in development and evolution in art a mere idiosyncrasy of Vienna-trained art historians: it animates the more recent studies of Roman Art by Jaś Elsner82 and Paul Zanker.83 Moreover, it remains a fruitful field of inquiry within the historical scholarship of Italian Renaissance architecture. In this field, Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz, James Ackerman, Howard Hibbard and Christoph-Luitpold Frömmel have identified a variety of paths of change or development. These lead from Brunelleschian planarity through Alberti’s distinctive antiquarianism84 and Bramante’s perspectival architecture all’antica. The last named was primarily viewed from afar or below and flayed of its original decorative skin, which had yet to be rediscovered85. This path continues through Raphael’s ornata maniera di fabbricare, inspired by the discovery of the Domus Aurea,86 up to the creation of ‘kinetic architecture’ of space attributed to Michelangelo (by Ackerman)87 or Giulio Romano (by Frömmel).88 Michelangelo’s and Giulio Romano’s near simultaneous invention of a new ‘kinetic’ architecture, in which perambulation, deliberate astonishment and variety shape the viewer’s movement through space into a transformative experience, is in marked contrast to the essentially static and stationary role of the viewer from Brunelleschi through Bramante. It was behind the twin banners of learned antiquarianism and the legacy of Michelangelo’s and Giulio’s architectural revolution that Borromini marched to immortality. More than any other artist, Borromini appears to have been Pollak’s art 81 Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method, London: Harvey Miler, 1999, 59-6, 104-37 and passim. 82 Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 and Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 83 Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, University of Michigan Press, 1988. 84 R. Krautheimer, ‘Alberti's Templum Etruscum’, in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, New York & London, 1969, 65-72. 85 Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1500-1600, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 12-20. 86 Based upon Raphael’s references to the “ornata maniera di fabbricare” in his letter to Leo X, Howard Hibbard argued that the discovery of intact interior decoration in the Domus Aurea and elsewhere led to the replacement of Bramante’s “plucked chicken” style, based as it was on bare ancient ruins, with the richer, more archaeologically accurate style which flourished for the rest of the century: Howard Hibbard, ‘Review of Wöfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque, tr. Kathrin Simon ,Glasgow, 1964’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 25:2, May,1966, 143. 87 James S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, London, 1961, 128-140. 88 Christoph L. Frömmel, ‘The Roman Works of Giulio’, Giulio Romano, tr. Fabio Barry, Cambridge, 1998, 88: ‘From a more general point of view, Giulio –much more clearly than Michelangelo—introduced the concept of movement into architecture’. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 35 historical muse; indeed, Borromini was a figure who preoccupied generations of Viennese art historians.89 Figure 10 Pollak’s transcription of a quote from the introduction to Wickhoff’s Wiener Genesis, Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar Figure 11 Pollak’s transcription of a quote from Riegl’s Spätrömisches KunstindustrieArchiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar Figure 12 Pollak’s transcription of a quote from p. 26 of Riegl’s Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Vienna: II – Nachlässe – Pollak, Oskar 89 Hermann Egger, ‘Francesco Borrominis Umbau von San Giovanni in Laterano’, in Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, eds. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte: Franz Wickhoff gewidmet von einem Kreise von Freunden und Schülern, Wien: A. Schroll, 1903, 154-162, accessed through https://books.google.com/, Max Dvořák, ‘Francesco Borromini als Restaurator’, Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission 1: 1907, 89-98, accesssed through https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kjbzk1907_beibl/0055/image, Eberhard Hempel, Francesco Borromini. Ro ̈mische Forschungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes Graz. Wien: Kunstverlag Anton Schroll & Co., 1924, Dagobert Frey, Beitra ̈ge zur Geschichte der ro ̈mischen Barockarchitektur. Augsburg: Filser, 1925, Hans Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1930. Michael Young Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics 36 In his published studies, and in his planned comprehensive surveys of Italian and Bohemian Baroque art, we observe Pollak embracing Alois Riegl’s partiality for identifying lines of artistic development in history and establishing artistic genealogies. (This approach is also manifest in the methodological strictures of Hans Tietze cited in footnote 6 supra.) Indeed, Pollak copied out epigrams from Wickhoff and Riegl, which can be found among his papers (figs 10, 11 and 12), presumably to guide him as he worked90. Perhaps Pollak’s stint at the Museum für Kunst und Industrie can be understood as an effort to emulate Riegl’s long tenure there. All of this evidence, combined with his mastery of documentary research under Ludwig von Pastor’s guidance, helps to clarify Pollak’s own evolution from Young Man from the Provinces (provincial at least in the cultural sense) with pronounced inclinations toward German cultural nationalism to cosmopolitan Austrian civil servant and scholar. Indeed the liberalism, supra-nationalism and humanistic scholarship that formed the bedrock of the Vienna School of Art History from Eitelberger to Dvořák (Strzygowski excepted) also shaped the maturation and defined the scholarly work of Oskar Pollak. A cognate, and surely related, patriotic ardor led to his volunteering in 1914 and to his eventual death on the Italian front in the following year, cruelly truncating a career of great promise. Michael Young is Humanities Librarian and Instructor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He has taught at Bard, Skidmore and Union Colleges, and at the Columbia University School of Architecture. He recently published ‘Speculum Principissae: The Chapel of St. Anne at Panenské Břežany, an Early Work of Johann Blasius Santini-Aichel’, in Annali di Architettura 28 (2016). michael.s.young@uconn.edu This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License 90 The quotatation from p. 26 of Riegl’s Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, as translated by Rolf Winkes in Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, Rome: Giorgio Brettschneider Editore, 1985, 23, reads: ‘This differentiation between two kinds of planes, the flat and the curved, is as important in the history of art as that between silhouette and color, because it expresses the fundamental difference between plane and space’. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics0F Michael Young For Joseph Connors michael.s.young@uconn.edu