Otto Pächt

The sketchbook

An unpublished sketchbook from Otto Pächt’s youth documents his early talent for drawing and reveals a lesser-known side of him. It contains pencil drawings and watercolours from 1913 to 1920. The earliest works date from his childhood. The sharpness of his eye is already remarkable and evident in these early drawings and would later shape his scholarly work. In January 1920, the year he began his university studies, he made several studies after Rembrandt’s portraits. Copying Rembrandt’s portraits was an early attempt to understand the artist’s work through the practice of drawing. Decades later, Rembrandt’s painting became a subject of Pächt’s art-historical research.

Teachers and intellectual milieu

In the winter semester of 1921–22 Pächt attended lectures by the medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt as a guest student in Berlin. Upon his return, he continued his studies under Julius von Schlosser and the archaeologist Emanuel Löwy, acquiring a broad grounding in the two disciplines.

Karl Maria Swoboda, later his predecessor in the Vienna chair, as well as Wilhelm Pinder, Josef Strzygowski, Hans Tietze, Heinrich Glück, Camillo Praschniker and Emil Reisch, also had a significant influence on Pächt’s development. Engagement with the founders of the Vienna School remained central to his work. He also became acquainted with colleagues such as Ernst Kris, Charles de Tolnay, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Hans Sedlmayr, Felix Horb and Johannes Wilde.

The dissertation

Pächt’s dissertation examined the pictorial treatment of three central subjects in Christian art: the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion. He traced their development from the beginnings of Christian imagery to the High Gothic period. His particular concern was the relationship between the subject represented (Vorwurf) and the pictorial form it assumed in each case.

Early publications and editorial work

Pächt’s publications between 1921 and 1937 chiefly addressed late Gothic panel painting and questions of art-historical method. One of his most important publications was Österreichische Tafelmalerei der Gotik (“Austrian Gothic Panel Painting”, 1929).

Until 1937, Pächt contributed to the Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur. Friedrich Antal and Bruno Fürst edited the first two volumes (1927/28 and 1928/29). Rudolf Kautzsch, Wilhelm Pinder, Georg Swarzenski and Karl Maria Swoboda were the general editors. In these volumes, Pächt reviewed Max Friedländer’s book on Dierick Bouts and Joos van Gent and surveyed recent literature on Gothic panel painting and stained glass in Austria. His contributions to the 1930–32 volume included Das Ende der Abbildtheorie (“The End of the Image Theory”). The journal continued the tradition of the Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen, founded by Franz Wickhoff in 1904 and continued by Max Dvořák until 1913. As a review journal associated with the Vienna School, it examined the methods and criteria of art-historical research. In 1937, following Antal’s emigration, Bruno Fürst headed its Vienna editorial office. Its print run was 400 copies.

Bruno Fürst later described these years as follows:

“Vienna was [for Pächt] the phase of rigorous art history, of his struggle against unscholarly approaches; the phase of structural analysis, of the ‘second art history’, and of adapting Gestalt theory to an art history grounded in method.”

The Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen

Pächt edited the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, published in Berlin by the Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt in 1931 and 1933. The publication represented an approach to art history influenced by Gestalt psychology and drawing on Alois Riegl.

The first volume opened with Hans Sedlmayr’s essay Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft (“Towards a Rigorous Study of Art”). Sedlmayr and Pächt emphasised the autonomy of pictorial form and the limits of verbal explanation. In their view, reconstructing the circumstances in which a work was made could not, on its own, account for the work itself. At the same time, they regarded its structure as a means of understanding its historical setting. The publication ceased in 1933 after two volumes following the Nazi seizure of power.

Meyer Schapiro’s review

In his 1936 review of the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen in The Art Bulletin, Meyer Schapiro called this approach the “New Vienna School”, a designation which later became widely used. He acknowledged the publication’s methodological ambition but criticised its use of abstract categories such as “race” and “spirit”, and the limited concrete historical findings it produced.

Schapiro had corresponded with Pächt since 1934 and particularly valued his work and that of Fritz Novotny. His review helped shape the reception of the group in the English-speaking world.

The Viennese Friendship with Robert Musil

Pächt’s friendship with the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880–1942) began in Vienna. In May 1934, he and Bruno Fürst launched an appeal to establish a Robert Musil Fund. This led to the foundation of the Vienna Robert Musil Society, which provided financial support and enabled the writer to continue his work. Its model was the Musil Society founded in 1932 and dissolved after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

Pächt supported the publication of Musil’s Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (‘Posthumous Papers of a Living Author’, 1935). Musil presented him with a copy bearing a handwritten dedication:

‘The copyright, I should have thought, belongs to Otto Pächt. If the book displeases, we share the blame; if it pleases, I can take the credit myself. What better arrangement could there be!’Robert Musil to Otto Pächt, dedication in Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten, December 1935

In June 1935, Pächt accompanied Martha and Robert Musil to Paris for the International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture. Their friendship continued until Musil’s death in exile in Geneva in 1942.

In 1960, Pächt published “Zur Vorgeschichte des Buches ‘Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten’” in the volume Robert Musil. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, edited by Karl Dinklage. Bruno Fürst also contributed to the volume.

His closest friend Bruno Fürst

No name appears more often in Pächt’s letters than that of Bruno Fürst (1896–1978). A pupil of Wilhelm Pinder, Fürst completed his doctorate in Munich in 1931 with a dissertation on fifteenth-century Austrian sculpture. He subsequently worked as an independent scholar.

During Pächt’s semester in Berlin in 1921/22, Karl Maria Swoboda asked Fürst to look after the young fellow student. Fürst later recalled being asked to take Pächt ‘under his wing’. Their meeting led to a lifelong friendship. Pächt called his friend ‘Knas’, a nickname derived from the Hungarian kenéz, an old word for a prince. The two collaborated on the editorial work for Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur and shared a commitment to supporting Robert Musil.

Fürst emigrated to England in 1938 with his wife, Erna Thieme. She was the daughter of Georg Thieme, founder of the Leipzig medical publishing house, and the niece of Ulrich Thieme, co-founder of the biographical dictionary of artists known as Thieme–Becker.

The names Pächt and Fürst appear together on the memorial to members of the University of Vienna’s Department of Art History.

The break with Hans Sedlmayr

During the Vienna years, Hans Sedlmayr was Pächt’s closest scholarly collaborator. Both were regarded as proponents of a new direction in art history. The extent of their political differences became clear in 1938, when Sedlmayr celebrated the Anschluss in his contribution to the Festschrift for Wilhelm Pinder. The breach remained unresolved. In a letter to Meyer Schapiro in 1952, Pächt commented on Sedlmayr’s attempts at rapprochement: ‘I am not interested in the psychology of chameleons.’

From Vienna to London

On 7 September 1937, he left Austria permanently, settling in London in 1938. Following the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, the firm David Pächt & Söhne and the family home at Lainzer Straße 6, near Schönbrunn in Vienna, were expropriated. His parents and his brother’s family emigrated to Manchester and set up the company English DEPA & Crepe Ltd there.

In August 1938 he was baptised in the Anglican parish of Kensington, where he was registered as “Art Historian”. Exile also changed the direction of his scholarship. During these years he began the systematic study of manuscript illumination, which was to become central to his work.

George Furlong and the visit to Dublin

George Furlong (1898–1987) had studied art history in Vienna. He took his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination, the field to which Pächt was to turn in exile. The two had been friends since their student years in Vienna. Furlong was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1935, the youngest director the institution had appointed to that date, and he invited Pächt to Dublin.

Research at the Warburg Institute

The Warburg Institute and the Courtauld Institute of Art became important centres of continental European art-historical scholarship in Britain. Among those active in this London milieu were Fritz Saxl, Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich, and, as an independent scholar, Frederick Antal.

From 1937 to 1941 Pächt was associated with the Warburg Institute, which had been transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933 under the direction of Saxl to escape National Socialist persecution. Pächt received support from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, which had been founded in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council to assist persecuted scholars.

The turn to manuscript studies

Pächt’s collaboration with the art historian and palaeographer Francis Wormald was decisive for his turn to manuscript studies. Wormald, then employed in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum, became one of Pächt’s closest scholarly friends in England. Since the museum’s collections had been evacuated during the war, he proposed that Pächt catalogue the manuscripts of the Bodleian Library. Pächt moved to Oxford early in 1941. Wormald later remarked of these years: ‘England was awfully good for Otto.’

The triptych in the Seilern collection

Count Antoine Seilern began studying art history with Johannes Wilde in Vienna in 1933 and completed his doctorate in 1939, having left Austria in 1938. A triptych depicting the Entombment of Christ, attributed to the Master of Flémalle, became one of the principal works in his London collection. It had been offered at Christie’s in London in August 1942 as a work by Adriaen Isenbrandt. Pächt recognised its significance and the questions surrounding its attribution. Seilern acquired it. Hermann Fillitz cited this discovery as an example of Pächt’s judgement as a connoisseur.

The English years brought Pächt not only scholarly collaboration but also personal ties.

Jeanne Thalia Pächt

Jeanne Thalia Michalopoulos (1902–1971), whom Pächt met in England, came from a Greek family. She and her siblings were educated in London at St. Paul’s School. Both took up drawing well before they met. Their professional lives were likewise devoted to art. Pächt pursued art-historical research, and Jeanne worked as a librarian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. They married at Aghia Sophia in London in January 1940. Their son Michael George was born in Oxford in October 1942.

Oskar Kokoschka

Pächt was also in contact with the Austrian émigré Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), who had lived in London since 1938.

Kokoschka’s letters to Pächt dealt with personal as well as professional matters. Writing in December 1941, he reported on watercolours sold by his wife Olda and on his continuing financial difficulties: ‘Life itself is a conspiracy against me, and you and dear Olda are in the thick of it too.’ In March 1942 he thanked Pächt for translating an article that the Tribune had rejected, ‘as usual!!!’, and urged him to return to London: “Do come soon and make up your mind to live in London again! Please!”

Art history in English: language and method

Emigration made English the language of Pächt’s scholarship and teaching. He attached particular importance to precision in art-historical terminology. John Beckwith and Francis Wormald described his exacting linguistic standards in these words: ‘Otto is very strict with us, sometimes even hard.’

The Bodleian Library catalogues

The cataloguing begun at Oxford culminated in the three volumes of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, prepared jointly with Jonathan J. G. Alexander. Clarendon Press published them in 1966, 1970 and 1973, after Pächt’s return to Vienna.

Academic career at Oxford

• 1945:Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Medieval Art at Oriel College
• 1950:University Lecturer
• 1952:Senior Lecturer
• 1956:Elected to the British Academy
• 1962:Reader

Visiting professorships in Princeton and New York

During his years at Oxford, Pächt held visiting professorships in the United States. From September 1956 to June 1957, he was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as a Member of the School of Historical Studies. Erwin Panofsky had held a professorship there since 1935. During his stay in Princeton, Pächt was given a study next to that of Elias Avery Lowe. The room had previously been used by Francis Wormald. Pächt was a close friend of both scholars. In 1960 a second visiting professorship took him to the Institute of Fine Arts in New York.

On 7 May 1956, before they had met in person, Panofsky thanked Pächt for sending an offprint of the first part of his review of Early Netherlandish Painting and described him as an “accomplished scholar”.

The debate with Erwin Panofsky

Pächt and Panofsky conducted their methodological debates from a shared background. Both had worked on Riegl, attended Adolph Goldschmidt’s lectures in Berlin and stood close to Fritz Saxl’s circle.

Pächt gave priority to the visible structure of the individual work. He opposed interpretations that explained the image chiefly through texts and symbols.

The letter to Ernst Gombrich

The presentation of the Viennese art-historical tradition to an English-speaking audience was also a concern in Pächt’s exchanges with Ernst Gombrich. On 26 November 1962, Pächt thanked Gombrich for returning the manuscript of his lecture on Riegl, which appeared in The Burlington Magazine in 1963. He had agreed to give the lecture only reluctantly, since he saw no way of avoiding polemic and did not want to air “domestic quarrels between refugees” before an English audience. What decided him was his disapproval of the way in which Gombrich presented Riegl to an audience that knew nothing of him. In Pächt’s view, this could only confirm the English in ignoring Riegl. He wrote: “I shall be no more able to de-Popper you than you will be able to de-Riegl me.”

Leaving England

When the University of Oxford established its first chair of art history in 1955, Edgar Wind was appointed. Pächt continued his work at Oxford.

In a letter to Meyer Schapiro in August 1962, Pächt weighed the opportunities for research at Oxford against the prospect of teaching in Vienna. His attachment to the Viennese tradition favoured a return. He left England in the summer of 1963.

The reign of the Ottonians

When Otto Demus and Otto Pächt took up their chairs at the University of Vienna’s Department of Art History in 1963, Karl Maria Swoboda marked the transition with a pun: the reign of the Carolingians was ending, and that of the Ottonians was beginning. The allusion linked his own first name, Karl, with the Carolingians and those of his two successors with the Ottonians.

Members of the department took up the theme at an evening gathering. Two portraits hung in the seminar room, each reflecting its subject’s field of research. One placed Demus, shown frontally, within the Justinian mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna. The other depicted Pächt in profile as St Matthew in the Ebbo Gospels, seated at a writing desk, with tousled hair and wide-open eyes.

In his account of the evening, Hermann Fillitz interpreted the second portrait as a reflection of Pächt’s character:

“I believe that in several respects the image did indeed capture Professor Pächt’s character: his passionate devotion to his discipline, and the eye that saw more than others and communicated what it saw. Art history throughout the world owes a great deal to that passion and that eye.”Hermann Fillitz, Erinnerungen an Otto Pächt

Otto Demus

The historian of Byzantine art Otto Demus (1902–1990) belonged to Pächt’s generation and had studied at the Vienna department at the same time. He emigrated to England in 1939. After returning to Austria in 1946, he became head of the Federal Monuments Authority. In 1963, the year Pächt returned from Oxford, Demus was appointed Professor of Byzantine Art History. The two were colleagues and friends. In his obituary of 1988, Demus offered an explicitly personal assessment of Pächt’s return and its significance:

‘He was one of the few scholars who returned to their homeland after the liberation of Austria. His return deserves all the more recognition because he had found a new home, scholarly success, numerous students and friends, and had started a family in England — in Oxford, which shortly afterwards sent him an honorary doctorate, the third awarded to an Austrian: the first had gone to Joseph Haydn. Otto Pächt left all this to return to Vienna in 1963 as Professor of Art History at the university where he had undertaken the greater part of his studies. By the time he returned, he was already over sixty and had produced an impressive body of work. Yet for him, and for the discipline he was to represent at the university, this return marked something of a new beginning. His research and teaching made Vienna a Mecca for art history; to have attended his lectures was regarded by young German-speaking students as both a duty and a coveted privilege. Never before, not even in the “classical period” of the “Vienna School” of Riegl, Wickhoff, Dvořák and Schlosser, had art history at the University of Vienna enjoyed such standing or exerted so great an international attraction.’

With their different areas of research, Pächt and Demus shaped the teaching of art history in Vienna during these years.

The manuscripts of the Austrian National Library

The study and cataloguing of the illuminated manuscripts in the Austrian National Library was one of Pächt’s principal projects in Vienna. He initiated a new catalogue series under the auspices of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and continued this work after his retirement.

With Dagmar Thoss, he produced the volumes on French manuscript illumination (1974 and 1977); with Ulrike Jenni, the volume on the Dutch school (1975). The volumes on the Flemish school followed in 1983 and 1990. The first was prepared with Jenni and Thoss, the second with Thoss and published after Pächt’s death.

Michael Pächt

After more than twenty years at Prestel in Munich, he established himself as an independent publisher and devoted himself to publishing his father’s scholarly work. The posthumous volumes grew out of the lectures. These are finely produced, carefully designed editions.

The publishers

The German editions were published by Prestel in Munich. Gustav Stresow, a typographer and book designer who had led the firm since 1946, recognised the scholarly importance of Otto Pächt’s work early on, and a friendship with the Pächt family grew out of their collaboration.

For the English editions Michael Pächt worked with Harvey Miller Publishers.

Spanish translations appeared with Alianza Editorial in Madrid and French editions with Macula in Paris.