Art history, art historians, and the search for legitimacy: the shaping of a fledgling discipline in flux in the German-speaking countries, 1870-1900

Abstract

This dissertation examines the formative decades of academic art history in the German-speaking world (c. 1870–1900), arguing that the discipline developed as a fundamentally multivalent field composed of competing forms, practices, and ideals. It explores why art history evolved in this multivalent way; why key parts of its practice simultaneously narrowed in subject matter and method; and how these dynamics were bound up with ongoing struggles for recognition and legitimacy within the university.

Methodologically, the study combines three complementary frameworks. Drawing on Max Weber’s theory of ideal types, it reconstructs several coexisting “types” of art history—ranging from Bildung-oriented and popular art history to auxiliary, specialist, and museum-based practice. Each of these reflected distinct practical orientations, conceptions of “art,” and disciplinary purposes. Using Thomas Gieryn’s notion of boundary work, it analyses how art historians negotiated the discipline’s borders in relation to neighbouring fields and non-academic actors. Finally, the concept of the scholarly persona is employed to explore configurations of virtues, epistemic ideals, and role expectations that shaped the potential personae that art historians could embody.

Empirically, the dissertation draws on lecture catalogues from Berlin, Bonn, and Leipzig, art-historical reviews, case studies of publishing practices, and the polemic known as the Berliner Streit. It shows how institutional expansion and curricular differentiation coexisted with a marked restriction of what counted as legitimate art and scholarship, privileging a Western, male, Greco-Roman canon and marginalising women and non-European art. Reviews and debates reveal divergent personae and hierarchies of virtues linked to different types of art history and sites of practice (university versus museum). The study concludes that art history’s Western canonical profile and enduring tension between accessibility and exclusivity emerged from art historians ongoing quest for legitimacy as an academic discipline with significant social and political elements. By reconstructing this history of multivalence and exclusion, it offers a critical resource for rethinking the discipline’s role and justification within contemporary universities.