Despite leading a multifaceted career—as scholar of painting, ornament, and architecture, museum curator, and monuments inspector—Alois Riegl (1858–1905) is today a key reference in several scholarly fields, but not across them. In art history, Riegl is firmly ensconced as the founder of the Vienna School of formalist analysis. His legacy in tracing deep-seated visual structures extends far beyond the work done in Vienna by controversial followers, notably Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, and Otto Pächt; it also informed the philological iconology of Aby Warburg’s Hamburg School, various postwar efforts to found an “image science”(Bildwissenschaft), and the recent push for a global history of visuality drawing on formal as well as cultural, material, and economic resources. At the same time, Riegl’s late writings as a monuments official and theorist of commemoration for the Austro-Hungarian Empire have made him a forerunner of postmodern memory studies (with their interest in pluralistic modes of accessing the past), as well as a foundational figure in contemporary conservation practice (where a Rieglian “values approach” has been a global standard since the 1970s). Many media theorists are also indebted to Riegl’s work: some by way of Walter Benjamin’s own sustained Rieglian engagements in the 1930s (as he was writing his history of photography and theorizing art’s technological reproducibility); others through the “logic of sense” that Gilles Deleuze unfolded from Riegl’s speculation on “haptic” modes of visual perception.

To bridge between these separate readerships—the art-historical, the conservationist, and the media-technical—a dossier of three Riegl translations is presented in this issue of Grey Room. United by his concept of mood (Stimmung), they are concise texts, central to Riegl’s reputation, but they have remained unavailable in English despite a growing (if unsystematic) corpus of Riegl translations. All three texts directly address his contemporaries’ aesthetic sensibilities and do so across a range of media from painting to masonry to magazine illustration. We hope they will help shift the emphasis in scholarly debates from feuding over neologisms (Kunstwollen above all) that have rigidified Riegl’s reputation to considering his concepts in relation to the practical, technical, and political concerns that were already clear to him.

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