Sloh, architektura, život : k teorii dějin umění Oldřicha Stefana : kratší studie

The article offers an interpretation of Oldřich Stefan's theory of art history, which he formulated in the first half of the 1940s and which has not yet received sufficient attention in historiographic research. Oldřich Stefan (1900–1969) explored the nature and meaning of art history as a 'science of style', which he understood to mean an inquiry into the relationship between art and life and how the intertwining of the two results in specific historical and contemporary ways of creating and understanding reality. This theory of art history that Stefan put forth is interpreted in the article as an expansion on the method of research advanced by the Vienna school of art history. Stefan adapted this approach to fit the needs of his science of style, which sought in the study of artistic forms to examine the relationship between the knowledge and creation of (artistic) reality and the relationship between the present and the past, and to do so by developing an awareness of the human experience of the super-individual principles of the style-generating process. In Stefan's view, it was the absence of this process that was the source of the intellectual and creative crisis that occurred in the first half of the 20th century.