“Reproduction of a drawing - Specialized Research AI at MIT

“Reproduction of a drawing
by M. Suppantschitsch.” Max
Suppantschitsch. Cypressen
(Cypresses). From Alois
Riegl, “Die Stimmung als
Inhalt der modernen Kunst”
(Mood as the Content of
Modern Art).

https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00301

Mood as the Content
of Modern Art

ALOIS RIEGL
TRANSLATED BY LUCIA ALLAIS AND ANDREI POP

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I have settled onto lonely Alpine peaks. The earthly realm sinks precip-
itously right before my feet, so that no object is left within my reach to
excite the organs of my sense of touch. The task of reporting is left to the
eye alone, and it has many and varied things to report. To start with,
grassy waves of earth bulge with colorful dappled flowers, begat by one
season to disappear with the next. At the boundary of this meadow, far
below, is a wood of dark spruces with countless upwardly striving points.
But a light like a puff of air shimmers right atop it, for it is early summer;
and new impulses break out powerfully to multiply daily the cubic con-
tent of the forest. At the edge of the wood, cows pasture. I know well that
they do not hold still for even an instant, but for now their existence is
announced only by tiny white points. When I lift my gaze to the cliff
across, it first meets the waterfall, which sprays down over walls the size
of houses and whose furious thunder drowns out every sound. While I
saw and heard it recently from up close, and felt diffident awe before its
monstrous force, now it seems but a soothing bright silver band through
the dark, rugged wilderness. When the eye finally dives into the green
bottom of the valley, it encounters a hut with shimmering white walls
and a little cloud of smoke floating beside it, witness to the bustle of
those living within.

When I thus survey the whole—everywhere signs of restless life; end-
less force and unceasing motion; thousandfold becoming and perishing;
yet also a consolidating peacefulness poured all over, letting not a single
dissonant impulse break out—there awakes in me an ineffable feeling of
animation, reassurance, harmony. It is as if some oppressive weight were
lifted from me, a persistent longing finally fulfilled. What is that oppres-
siveness that casts dark shadows on our mental life, and why does it
waver when a sunlike effect is brought out by a glimpse into the endless
universe—even a mere sliver of it, barely as much as imperfect human
sense is able to grasp in one instant?

The oppression springs from what we know, from the ripe fruit of the
tree of knowledge. We now know that a law of causality pervades all of
Creation. Every becoming determines a disappearing, every life requires

a death, every movement takes place at the
cost of another. In this endless and restless
struggle to survive, man, so richly endowed
with feeling and reason, suffers infinitely
more than the modest living things that he
destroys by the hundreds with just one move.
For thousands of years, all of the work of
human civilization has aimed to banish the
natural but brutal right of the stronger and to
replace it with an emancipatory world order.
Today, at the end of these great and protracted
efforts, our fate seems inescapable, inevitable.
Instead of restfulness, peace, and harmony:
an endless struggle, destruction, discord, at
least as far as life and motion hold sway.

What the soul of modern man craves, consciously or unconsciously,
is fulfilled for that solitary seer on his mountain height. What surrounds
him is not the peace of the graveyard, for he sees life blossom thousand-
fold. But what is pitiless struggle from up close seems from a distance a
peaceful side-by-side existence, concord, harmony. Thus he feels him-
self saved from the distressing oppression that never leaves him for
even a day in ordinary life. He senses that, high above the oppositions,
his imperfect senses generate the illusion of something unfathomable in
his vicinity, a world-soul penetrating all things and uniting them in per-
fect accord. It is this presentiment of order and legitimacy over the
chaos, of harmony over the dissonances, of rest over movements, that we
call mood [Stimmung]. Its elements are restfulness and far-sightedness
[Fernsicht].

My devout seeing is disturbed by a noise. A chamois has sprung into
my vicinity, then hurried on with considerable leaps over neighboring
slopes. With a start, my whole attention has turned from the peaceful
landscape to the goat. Involuntarily my right hand twitches, as if after a
shotgun. The predator presents itself, wanting to bring the weaker crea-
ture, as prey, into the domain of its organs of touch. The walking stick—
my sole weapon—is in any case insufficient for the purpose; but the gaze
follows with greedy satisfaction every movement of the animal, until it
disappears behind a crag. And now? The fine mood is gone, scared off,
vanished. This mood is such a subtle thing that a sign of life in the vicinity
suffices to blow it away. A single bird’s cry in the air can have the same
effect; just as a sharp blast of wind makes me shiver and bids me tighten
my coat, or a powerful ray of sunlight burns my neck. These are not
organic life forms but movements that call forth my own movements. It

28 Grey Room 80

Above: “Marine scene.
Reproduction of an oil paint-
ing by Carlos Grethe.” Carlos
Grethe. Frachtsegler (Cargo
ship). From Alois Riegl, “Die
Stimmung als Inhalt der
modernen Kunst” (Mood as
the Content of Modern Art).

Opposite: “Reproduction of
a charcoal drawing by Sion
Wenban.” Sion Longley
Wenban. Landschaft
(Landscape). From Alois
Riegl, “Die Stimmung als
Inhalt der modernen Kunst”
(Mood as the Content of
Modern Art).

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is a cross-checking of those elements—restfulness and far-sightedness—
from which emerges mood: movement and near-sightedness have pulled
me back into the existential struggle.

The redemptive mood does not welcome us only on commanding
alpine heights, however much modern humanity seeks them out so
happily, in significant contradistinction with our ancient and medieval
ancestors who sought out the struggle in the valleys. Mood can also
approach us where the level of the dry earth is the lowest—on the sea
beach—if restfulness and far-sightedness lure it out. Preferably in quiet
bays, where the pebbles are softly licked just so by the waves, where a
rowboat lies propped half out of the water, and where sunlight filters
through the branches of the trees on the shore, twinkling on the water
below with a thousandfold life. Yet a mood can take hold even on open
beaches, when we manage to turn our gaze away from the breakers (surg-
ing forward with ceaseless force and drawing back ever again, impotent
and fruitless, a clear mirror image of the world’s machinations in the
near distance) toward the wide surface beyond—transfigured by a light
dazzle of sun, edged by a colorful ribbon on the horizon, with a band of
smoke above that reveals a steamship, no longer visible, pulling away.
For even among tremendous elemental waste, the human bustle does not
stand still.

And so there is no thing in Creation whose appearance categorically
excludes mood. It is not at all about subject matter, for even the greatest
enemy of mood—the human being—can convey it to us: necessary are
only restfulness and far-sightedness.

What nature grants man only in rare moments, art is expected to
conjure up at his every whim. As soon as visual art advanced beyond
utilitarian and decorative motives, an achievement we are accustomed
to label “higher” art, from this very beginning visual art has ultimately
had no other calling than to provide man with the consoling certainty
that there exists an order and harmony. He finds it lacking in the narrow-
ness of the world-machinery, and he pines for it constantly, for without
it his life seems unbearable. Of course, in earlier times, man sought har-
mony elsewhere; for this reason the highest goal of art was not to arouse

Riegl | Mood as the Content of Modern Art

mood. This highest goal has changed as many times as the worldview of
humanity (by which I mean the respective portion of humanity that led
culture in each phase). Until now we have had three such changes to
chart. Let us try, in short broad strokes, to recall their repercussions on
humanity’s need for harmony.

The oldest, most primitive stage is that of the struggle of all against all.
Man can rely only on his personal physical strength; but he perceives
that there are unfathomable natural forces for which his own strength is
no match. He constructs for himself a visible carrier of those hostile
forces—the fetish—and pays it a tribute of veneration. With this he
thinks himself protected, and his discomfort gives way to harmony. The
fetish thus marks both the beginning of religion and of all higher art.

The second stage is distinguished by the proposition that might makes
right. The struggle is no longer of all against all, but rather, a great number
of those who are weaker prostrating themselves before one who is phys-
ically stronger. This strikes the humanity of that epoch as the natural
order of things in the world. This stage comprises all of antiquity. The
process ends naturally with the victory of one who is strongest over all
others; that is, the Roman emperor. This is how the antique ideal was
reached. Its reasoning was: struggle is surely disharmony, but one that
ends the moment the stronger triumphs. For this reason, the art of antiq-
uity celebrates the physically strong, the victorious, the important, the
vitally mobile, the physically beautiful. The gods, of whom there are
always fewer and fewer, are strong and beautiful. This is why they are
above all anthropomorphic, for among organic natural beings there is
nothing stronger or more beautiful than the human being. The human
figure as such therefore plays the principal role in ancient art. But because
the anthropomorphic gods are strong and beautiful, they grant victory
also to the strong and beautiful person. Even the weak participates in
this victory, for he trustfully subjugates himself to the stronger.

This naive trust in the gods is, as I said, the foundation of the art and
culture of antiquity. The harmony it seeks lies entirely in physical superi-
ority. However, as there is a mind [Geist] along with the material body,
so there is also moral strength and authority [Gewalt] alongside physical
strength and authority. This is a factor that only gradually enters human
culture and comes to determine its further destinies. It is obvious that for
the ancient Egyptians moral authority had no validity yet; we encounter
no trace of moral expression in their art. The pre-Alexandrian Greeks,
we already see, embark upon it; but their gods gaze indifferently and the
affects their art represents are only the most elementary, like joy and sor-
row. Far greater was the attention to the mental (spiritual) in the art of
Hellenism and the Roman Empire: here we encounter elementary out-

30 Grey Room 80

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bursts of immediate affect as in Laocoön, and also idyllic designs in
which we may recognize the direct precursors of our modern art of mood
[Stimmungskunst]. In order to explain this latter, we must remember that
the beginning of the Roman Empire coincides with the birth of Christ.
The rise of Christianity is, however, from the standpoint of cultural
history, nothing but the expression of an already-awakened unease, on
the part of ancient humanity, with the acknowledged inadequacy of the
pagan belief in the gods. The craving for a moral world order becomes
ever more pressing. From now on, not physical but mental—that is,
moral strength—is to guarantee humanity’s peaceable enjoyment of life’s
goods. This worldview—which was longed after by all but inevitably
fought by the Roman Empire, which long felt its existence threatened by
it—this worldview was preached by Jesus Christ.

The third stage can be dated to the victory of Christianity: the Christian
Middle Ages. Trust in the divine is still where one seeks harmony from
the discord of life, and security from the hostile powers, whether physi-
cal or spiritual; however, this protection is no longer assured by a plurality
of physically strong gods, but rather by one single, morally strong God
without any physical substance—pure spirit. Christian art never tires of
exalting God’s spiritual attributes and the moral virtues of the saints. In
the process, and despite the purely spiritual essence of God, not only the
saints but also the three divine persons are clothed in the form of organic
natural creatures, indeed primarily in human form. From the beginning,
this inner contradiction reveals the inseparability of mind and body and
with it the practical insufficiency of the Christian worldview, which is
built solely on morality. As in antiquity, so, too, in the Middle Ages the
human figure remains the central object of art. But since it is no longer a
matter of embodying physical beauty, but rather of spiritual perfection,
the part of the human body that is predominantly handled with more
care and affection is precisely the one where inner, spiritual impulses
are revealed to the outside with especial clarity: that is, the face. Among
the three worldviews sketched so far, all expect harmony to be manufac-
tured by the personal intervention, so to speak, of an infallibly greater
power. All are therefore founded exclusively on trust in divinity, yet
the Christian view is undoubtedly the most perfect and satisfying to
mankind, because it guarantees the protection of the moral person by a
moral power [Gewalt]. But everything here depends on faith. As long as
I trust unconditionally that God will protect me, a just person, from a
bolt of lightning, the Christian worldview provides me with complete
harmony. But this changes as soon as I install a lightning rod on my
house: from this moment on, I trust more in my knowing that I can safely
expect the protection I desire from that device, than in my faith, which

Riegl | Mood as the Content of Modern Art

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Above: “Hamburg motif.
Reproduction of a graphite
drawing by Ch. Storm van’s
Gravesande.” Carel Nicolaas
Storm van’s Gravesande.
Motiv aus Hamburg. From
Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung
als Inhalt der modernen
Kunst” (Mood as the Content
of Modern Art).

Opposite: “Demolition of
the Elizabeth Bridge, by
Carl Pippich.” Karl Pippich.
Demolierung der
Elisabethbrücke. From Alois
Riegl, “Die Stimmung als
Inhalt der modernen Kunst”
(Mood as the Content of
Modern Art).

should have made the lightning rod seem dispensable. Which is to say
that faith alone, at least in earthly material things, no longer guarantees
me full harmony. Thus the Christian worldview appears abandoned and
overpowered, especially in those domains that are decisive for art—in
the apprehension of natural law. From now on, I may hope for harmony
only through knowledge.

With this opens the fourth stage, perhaps best described as the
natural-scientific worldview. By analogy to the polytheistic and monothe-
istic worldviews, one could call it the pantheistic, but it would be
misguided to see in it a principled opposition to the monotheistic world-
view. Such an opposition does not apply; as a matter of fact, for most
educated Europeans today the two worldviews go hand in hand. The
natural-scientific worldview is indeed based on the emancipation of
knowledge from faith, but not on the elimination of faith. For insofar as
we can see, at least today, no form of knowledge can illuminate the ulti-
mate causes [letzte Ursachen] of Being, and the need for harmony alone
forces us to ultimately accept the clarification of causes and effects
from revealed religion. As for the causal relations between all natural
phenomena—physical and, more recently, also mental—only a few rigor-
ously pious souls among us expect illumination to proceed exclusively
from knowledge. The insights of science [des Wissens] are often embar-
rassing to us; we are often overcome by the thought that the pious races
of the past must have been generally happier than we are. Pessimism is,
not coincidentally, a specific symptom of our modern intellectual life. But
the same knowledge also provides us with redeeming harmony by allow-
ing us, over and above the narrowness of conflicting individual phenom-
ena, to see a whole chain of those very phenomena as if from a distance.
The more phenomena we thus grasp with one look, the more certain, lib-
erating, edifying becomes for us the conviction that an order balances
everything for the best. On this harmony, which is at the same time pro-

32 Grey Room 80

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voked and offered by knowledge, is based modern art, the art of mood.

Just as our modern knowledge no longer observes natural phenomena
in their isolation the way pagan antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages
had (as individual utterances of a personal deity) but rather ties them
causally to their immediate and extended environment: so does modern
art proceed in the reception of those natural impressions. It cannot sur-
pass them, but re-creates them with its own peculiar means. This makes
it clear, above all, why the modern need for mood is directly fed and
fully satisfied only by means that rely on a purely optical reception and
is thus inherently far-sighted: painting. In contrast, the other genre of
“high” art that dominated classical antiquity, sculpture—which chal-
lenges the sense of touch and is thus inevitably near-sighted—owes its
continued maintenance today essentially only to the conservative ten-
dencies of our cultural tradition and to the needs of decoration. What do
we demand in contrast from painting; that is to say, from two-dimensional
pictorial representation in the broadest sense of the word? Neither the
beauty of proportion nor of line, as classical antiquity demanded, nor
spiritual elevation, as did the Christian Middle Ages: rather, truth to life
at any cost. The strict observation of the law of causality constitutes the
core of the visual arts’ modern aesthetic, and especially in painting. We
allow ourselves to be challenged by the most unusual imagery (even red
trees or green horses), as long as their lighting and reflections seem
cogently motivated. What we will never put up with from the artist is the
naked miracle, by which I do not mean poetry born of fantasy, but an
earnestly performed abrogation, by “supernatural” personal forces, of
the experientially based causal law.

Mood as the goal of all modern painting is thus in the end nothing but
the soothing conviction of the unshakable dominion of the law of causal-
ity. It is difficult to show this in individual concrete examples. For when
closely observing [nahsichtiger Betrachtung; i.e., observation involving

Riegl | Mood as the Content of Modern Art

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“Reproduction of an oil
painting by R. Konopa.”
Rudolf Konopa.
Winterlandschaft (Winter
landscape). From Alois
Riegl, “Die Stimmung als
Inhalt der modernen Kunst”
(Mood as the Content of
Modern Art).

“nearsight”] individual pictures, the fundamental law always seems
bogged down by blurring contingencies and only opens itself with the
desired clarity to those who can survey a whole group of individual
phenomena from a distance. Before the individual picture, it is sensed
and felt rather than clearly seen. For this reason, the reproductions
attached to this article are not intended to somehow illustrate the char-
acter of modern mood painting exhaustively, but meant rather as pure
experiments at random, as they were found in the editors’ portfolio.
Perhaps more success can be expected from a compilation of individual
observations, such as impose themselves particularly often on the spec-
tator of modern pictures. At this point we must content ourselves with a
few examples.

The essence of mood reveals itself most immediately in the creations of
masters like Max Liebermann or [Carel Nicolaas] Storm van ’s Gravesande,
who reproduce an extract of their environs with all optically perceptible
contingencies in silhouette and movement, light and color. These con-
tingencies are necessities to the painter, however, for it is precisely
through them that the rule of causal law is expressed, penetrating and
binding all natural things. The greatest difficulty here comes in repre-
senting a change in place; for instance, a human figure represented in the
midst of walking violates the law of causality, because the law would
demand an immediate continuation of the movement, which it is naturally
impossible to ask of painted figures. In such cases the impressionist
masters are happy to avail themselves of multiple and, as it were, moving
outlines for their figures, rather than simple, firm ones. But in general
the goal of modern painting is not so much to represent motion, as the
capability of motion: the figures should seem capable of every organic
manifestation of life, without actually manifesting it. This attitude proves,

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understandably, quite fruitful for the representation of vegetal and inor-
ganic nature (rocks, water, clouds) whose movements do not proceed
from free will but result from physical laws. This explains why land-
scape occupies pride of place in modern art.

But the modern artist does not let his right to free invention shrivel
away. [Arnold] Böcklin does not make his mermaids, nor [Hans] Thoma
his satyrs, as “extracts from nature,” but rather more as products of
fantasy; their intelligibility is grounded in our inclination for nature
poetry. The artist does not want to make us believe in the real existence
of such hybrids, but he does want to convince us that, had they existed,
they would look and behave just so and not otherwise. They too must
obey the law of causality, for which the forefathers of the antique-pagan
mythology, the ancient Egyptians, would not have given a handful of
figs. And the same is true of those works whose problem is constituted
by the psychic manifestations of life of the genus Homo. The essential
role that landscape seems to play usually in that context (Max Klinger)
is a decisive hint in the direction sketched above.

Is this art of mood really a fruit of the most recent epoch, however—
that is to say, of our times? Must its beginnings not reach back at least as
far as the separation of faith from knowledge? It is true that mood gener-
ally constitutes the final goal of all of modern art since the end of the
Renaissance. To be sure, we have been able to trace some of its precur-
sors as far back as Hellenistic times: that is, a time when pagan antiquity
began to lose its former devotion to its beautiful, strong world of gods,
and when the pursuit of natural science experienced also its first great
flowering. But in place of the categorical pagan faith in the divine, soon
enough there followed the no less categorical Christian one, and the nat-
ural sciences cultivated with such dazzling results in post-Alexandrian
antiquity became as good as superfluous for another millennium. Only
at the conclusion of the Middle Ages did the knowledge of nature once
again begin to dominate human intellectual life, and its separation from
faith could no longer be prevented. It is just that the process that ensued
did so at an uneven tempo, and by no means continuously, but with
repeated setbacks. What is most self-evident is that in Protestant coun-
tries, where the Reformation had accomplished that separation sud-
denly, at least with respect to physical nature, the process took place
more quickly than in Catholic countries, where the Church famously, to
this day, rejects the separation of faith and knowledge on principle. For
the first time among the Dutch of the seventeenth century we encounter
painting that is founded exclusively and simultaneously on restfulness
and far-sightedness. And right away we see that another peculiarity of
modern art makes its appearance: at the center of artistic production is

Riegl | Mood as the Content of Modern Art

“Reproduction of a charcoal
drawing by Sion Wenban.”
Sion Longley Wenban.
Landschaft (Landscape).
From Alois Riegl, “Die
Stimmung als Inhalt der
modernen Kunst” (Mood as
the Content of Modern Art).

no longer the human being, but rather the whole breadth of nature, in
whose midst the artist moves. Man is no longer the ruler, as in antiquity
and even still in the Middle Ages, but only one link in an endless chain.
Thus a leveling social tendency comes to expression; Christianity cre-
ated its first precondition, and it gives our contemporary culture a large
part of its character and direction. But close beside Dutch art there
bloomed, at the same time, a Catholic art: that of Rubens. It was full of
life and movement, but it took on at the same time a decisive inclination
toward far-sightedness, smoothing down or blurring the drastic, violent
character of motions and thus removing what is inharmonious in them.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the separation of faith and
knowledge, though not admitted on principle was de facto complete,
even in those countries that remained Catholic. At this point the full
breakthrough of the art of mood faced no more obstacles, even here [in
Austria]. However, man has always found it uneconomical to seek out
the new, as long as something old but serviceable was at hand: this we
learn not only from the Renaissance, with its carefree borrowing from
antiquity, but even from antiquity itself, which plundered ancient orien-
tal motifs just as unscrupulously. And thus began the cycle of repetition
of past styles. Styles become historical, from pre-Alexandrian antiquity
onward, and are brought back into circulation not for their own sake, as
one might think, or out of sheer helplessness, but with the more or less
conscious intention of gathering up, from the existing supply of earlier
centuries’ artistic monuments, whatever seems to satisfy the more or less
clearly felt needs for mood. It is from this point of view that the history
of the past century of European art will one day have to be written. For
it is not by chance that among all the ancients we have fallen for Attic art
with its Olympian repose, rather than for the Laocoön, for instance,
which Bernini still praised as the most perfect work of sculpture. Not by
chance does the Venetian painting of daily life [Existenzmalerei] still
appeal to us, and not the bombastic manner of the Roman Baroque
masters, who still tended toward ancient near-sightedness [Nahsicht]. It
is not by chance that we have taken as our model the tranquil, detached
Velázquez, the only secular painter of those Habsburgs who sat on the
Spanish throne, but not his rutting, enraptured countrymen.

Mood and devotion live close to one another. For devotion is after all
nothing but religious mood. There are therefore deep reasons for the fact
that, insofar as we are able to survey the cultural history of mankind,
mood always becomes the highest goal of art in periods also character-
ized by a deep religious excitement. The first time was in late antiquity,
when belief in the pagan gods was shaken, preparing the ground for the
emergence of Jesus Christ. A second time came in modern times, as a

36 Grey Room 80

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result of that tremendous movement of spirits that we call Reformation
and Counter-Reformation. Lastly, today we see that parallelism return for
a third time. For no one can doubt that we live in a spiritually deeply
excited time. Even Catholicism has rejuvenated itself, unfolding in
recent years a power of persuasion that many would not have thought
possible sixty years ago. But the great majority of minds can no longer
reassure itself in the moral world order, just as it has long been unable to
in the physical world order, with a devoted faith in the supernatural.
They await enlightenment from the many newly founded disciplines
occupied with the intellectual side of human nature: psychophysics,
ethnology, social science, and so on. Yet art remains loyally by its side:
as in all other times, it once again helps the soul find that salvation, that
liberation, that it needs imperatively, if the will to live is not to be
denied. So it is our artists who draw the last, highest, most decisive gain
from modern knowledge, and thus bring the solace-seeking humanity of
our time [Zeitgeschlecht] relief, if not salvation.

Note
Originally published as Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst,”
Die graphischen Künste 22 (1899): 47–56.

Riegl | Mood as the Content of Modern Art

37 “Reproduction of a drawing image