The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Riegl, Alois

Born Jan. 14, 1858, in Linz; died June 17, 1905, in Vienna. Austrian art historian.

Riegl became a professor at the University of Vienna in 1897. He represented the Vienna school of art studies. His polemic against G. Semper’s theory that material was the key element determining the laws of forms had a great influence on the development of Riegl’s views. Riegl rejected the normative view that was characteristic of 19th-century art studies, which interpreted art history as a sequence of periods of decline and progress evolving toward a common ideal. He advanced the concept of an immanent artistic will that determined the characteristic features of each artistic era, including periods of haptic (flat, tactile) and optical (three-dimensional) treatment of form. Despite the idealism of Riegl’s hypotheses, his theory led to the development of more varied techniques for analyzing artistic form.

WORKS

Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie, vols. 1–2. Vienna, 1901–23.
Das holländische Gruppenporträt. [Vienna] 1902.
Gesammelte Aufsätze. Augsburg-Vienna, 1929.

REFERENCES

Istoriia evropeiskogo iskusstvoznaniia: Vtoraia polovina XIX v.—nachalo XX v., book 1. Moscow, 1969. Pages 65–73.
Piwocki, K. Pierwsza nowoczesna teoria sztuki: Pogla̧dy Aloisa Riegla. Warsaw, 1970.

References in periodicals archive

No inicio do seculo XX, esse conceito encontrou terreno fertil entre os teoricos da Escola de Viena, como o historiador Alois Riegl, que influenciou diretamente o trabalho de Gombrich.

Graphic representation: A critical approach about the theories of representation and perception of Gombrich and Arnheim in the context of graphic design/Representacao Grafica: uma abordagem critica sobre as teorias de representacao e percepcao de Gombrich e Arnheim no contexto do design grafico

In 1894-95, the art critic Alois Riegl delivered a series of lectures on the Baroque at the University of Vienna, (41) and in 1899 he first taught a seminar on Bernini there.

D'Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque prelude of II Piacere

Here, art-historical tropes of continuity and mutation propagated by Alois Riegl and Aby Warburg politicized an international gathering of migration-themed, performance-centric commissions, which deftly invited one to rethink classical notions of innovation and originality.

"Body Luggage": Kunsthaus Graz

What I really don't understand is how this overview can do without Alois Riegl, a virtual hinge between Late Roman-into-Byzantine and modern art, who directly derived his notion of 'negative complimentary motifs'--never 'negative space'--from Augustine's notion of evil as privation of the good.

Byzantium/Modernism: Eds Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina

AT LEAST SINCE THE VIENNESE ART historian Alois Riegl coined the term Kunstwollen or "will-to-form" over a century ago, scholars and curators have been increasingly inclined to evaluate works of art in period terms, without regard to aesthetic norms or standards of technical competence transcending particular historical contexts.

Natural right and art history

Alois Riegl opens his 1899 essay "Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst" by evoking the mechanisms of landscape.

The world of the landscape

For instance, in analyzing the Humbabahead orthostats (here conflated into one) from Tell al Rimah through the formalist methodology of Alois Riegl, Steymans avoids engaging with the scholarship of David Oates, Marie-Therese Barrelet, Theresa Howard Carter, and others on the original context and function of these reliefs.

Gilgamesch: Ikonographie eines Helden