Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art This article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the (...) framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to address some difficulties related to the development of an emerging research program called world art studies. While it originates as a European discipline in the German scholarly tradition around 1900, this program comes to the fore only recently, with recent advances in natural and cognitive sciences which hold promise for providing more inclusive categories that could serve the study of art as a worldwide phenomenon. I focus more specifically on the strengths and weaknesses (...) of psychology as explanatory framework for world art studies. Unlike the romantic art historiographers of the late 19th century, contemporary scholars no longer dwell on collective mentalities or spirits of an age but the problem of postulating mysterious faculties in relation to art behavior and aesthetic response is still present when adopting as an entry point the universality of human nature. (shrink)