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At the tura of the 1960s and 1970s there was little particularly lively interest in the so called Vienna school of art history. Therefore, one may wonder why it was precisely at this time that rwo books - one devoted to Alois Riegl and the other to Max Dvofak, appeared in Poland. The first, Ksawery Piwocki's (1901-1974), Pierwsza nowoczesna teoria sztuki. Poglądy Aloisa Riegla [The First Modern Theory of Art. The Views of Alois Riegl] was published in the year 1970. It was a strange book indeed. Its core consisted of a number of citations from Riegl, some of which were extremely long, taking up even up to a few pages and accompanied exclusively by very short commentaries. Piwocki's did not interest in Riegl per se and he did not want to deal with the history of art history. His primary goal was to point out to what in his view was the proper way of conducting modern research on art. He did not treat Riegks views as the last word on this subject, but merely as an inspiration to preparing better research tools than those proposed by iconology. That is why The First Modern Theory' of Art was not a complete monograph on the Viennese scholar. Piwocki focused exclusively on two issues which were of importance to the author of Spdtrómische Kunstindustrie: namely on the problem of Kunstwollen and his theory of values. Kunstwollen allowed Piwocki to save the concept of style through the defense of its objective ontological status. At the same time, sińce it was an outlook that was the source of the formal features typical of a given period, it was not in iconography. but in the presentation of form that one had to look for the most characteristic features defining the mentality of a given historical period. The category of Kunstwollen could function only within an understandmg of art that did not refer past epochs to some timeless aesthetic canon. Hence Piwocki emphasized strongly the importance of Riegks axiological pluralism and its significance for the emergence of modern art history. In the First Modern Theory of Art, Riegl's axiology from Der modernę Denkmalkultus was presented in an exhaustive way, but the commentary referred almost exclusively to "age value". Age value, which takes into account the aesthetic system, the technical and artistic ąuality of works of art, allows one to properly define and evaluate paintings, sculptures or buildmgs. At the same time, it enables one to work out objective criteria of assessment as the elements that make up the value of a given work are evaluated not in the context of one's own. subjective preferences that belong to a different epoch, but within the context of the Kunstwollen of the period from which a given work of art comes. For such a system of assessment consists in incorporating an individual object into the "chain of historical development of forms and their significance". The artistic value is nothing else but the "display" of perfection in terms of the style typical of a given historical period; it boils down to posing and solving the problem in such a way that it can last eternally and inspire the successive generations. In this way, axiology ultimately confirms the necessity of focusing the historical-artistic research on issues associated with form, and not on iconography. The little booklet authored by Lech Kalinowski (1920-1994), professor of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, entitled Max Dvofak i jego metoda badań nad sztuką [Max Dvofak and His Method of Art Research] differed completely from Piwocki's treatise. In Kalinowski's book, there were almost no ąuotations - Dvofak's writings appeared in the same year m another book edited by Lech Kalinowski entitled Max Dvofak i jego teoria dziejów sztuki [Max Dvofak and His Theory of the His tory of Art]. The brochure consisted of a few chapters in which the author discussed the biography of the scholar, the two phases in his research on the history of art, a reconstruction of the scholar's views from the second phase of his research, a critical assessment of his views, the relationship between Kunstgeschichte ais Geistegeschichte and iconology, as well as a short presentation of the followers of the Vienna professor and an outline of the impact of his thought on the futurę generations of art scholars. Typically of Kalinowski, the text was accompanied by a huge apparatus of references in which the author gathered the entire available sources relating to Dvofak. The brochure was written in a distanced, dry and impartial tone. Both in the Preface and in the entire text it is futile to look for traces of the Cracow professor's personal attitude to the methodology of the Czech-Vienna scholar. The reason for writing the booklet was explained in its subtitle "on the centenary" of the scholar 's birth. However, why did Kalinowski become interested in views which he did not actually take advantage of? No doubt, Kalinowski may have been influenced by his long friendship with Dvofak's student, Karolina Lanckorońska - in the 1930s arenowned specialist on Michelangelo - under whose supervision Kalinowski began his studies in Lvov, a year before the outbreak of World War II. However, a more important reason was probably the scholar's personal interest in the methodology and history of art history as well as his striving to make it possible for the Polish reader to become acąuainted with the thought of the most important representatives of this discipline. In 1962, a Polis also appeared in translation. In the following year, 1971, Jan Białostocki published a selection of Erwin Panofsky's papers entitled Studia z historii sztuki [Studies in Art History]. An anthology of Dvofak's writings and an analysis of his methodology was thus the logical continuation of a project aimed at presenting in the Polish language the most important classics of this discipline as well as the up-to-date tendencies in art research. Around 1970, Lech Kalinowski began to lose faith in the futurę of iconology. He pointed out to the distortions of Panofsky's method, which he referred to, ąuoting the author of Meaning in the Yisual Arts, as an "astrological way of studying the content of a work of art". The sense that the iconological method was at the point of exhaustion, did not lead Lech Kalinowski to the discovery of Max Dvofak's views for himself. Yet, one may say that remembering the silhouette of the Vierma scholar contributed to the weakening of the position of iconology as the only legitimate way of examining works of art. It also served as a guideline reminding scholars that one should continually look for the most suitable analytical methods. In all likelihood, the above remarks entitle one to put forward a hypothesis that both the publication of Piwocki's book on Riegl and Kalinowski's book on Dvofak, formed an opposition to the iconological mainstream of Polish art history. Piwocki longed for the restitution of an old method, in an attempt to rescue the specificity of a work of art contained in its form. Kalinowski too drew attention to the role of form as a means expressing visual Communications that were much richer than the iconological "symptoms of an era". Both books appeared at a special time. The 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s of the twentieth century were a special period in Polish art history; namely, they were an extraordinary period of particularly intense methodołogical reflection. Besides the above-mentioned publications, one should also mention Mieczysław Porębski's Ikonosfera [Iconosphere], published in 1970 which constitutes a summing up of his research in the sphere of semiotics of visual culture as well as a discussion of the Poznań art historians with Martin Warnke in Rogalin in the year 1973; the latter ones analyzed approvingly, though at the same time critically, the achievements of the young, rebellious German art historians. In subseąuent years, this impetus had died down. Piwocki died, Kalinowski did not develop his ideas any further, Porębski operated within a narrow group of the twentieth century art historians, while the Poznań group turning towards post-structuralism, remained in isolation for a long time. In the year 1980, Jan Białostockie book entitled Historia wśród nauk humanistycznych [History ofArtAmong the Humanistic Disciplines ofKnowledge] was published. The book constituted an apology for the status quo, as it argued that the only proper research method combining the elements of all other approaches, was iconology.