Renate Wagner-Rieger (10 January 1921 – 11 December 1980, her maiden name is Renate Rieger) was an Austrian art historian and educator, with significant research in the fields of

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

and

historicism Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including ideas and beliefs), by studying their history, that is, by studying the process by which they came about. The term is widely ...

Education and career

Renate Rieger was born on 10 January 1921 in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. In 1942 she studied art history at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

, under

Hans Sedlmayr Hans Sedlmayr (18 January 1896, in Szarvkő, Kingdom of Hungary – 9 July 1984, in Salzburg) was an Austrian art historian. From 1931 to 1932 and from 1938 onwards, he was a member of the Nazi Party. Positions as a University Professor Sedlm ...

and Karl Oettinger and received her PhD in 1947 under

Karl Maria Swoboda Karl may refer to: People * Karl (given name), including a list of people and characters with the name * Karl der Große, commonly known in English as Charlemagne * Karl Marx, German philosopher and political writer * Karl of Austria, last Austri ...

on the architectural facade of the Viennese apartments from the 16th to the mid-18th century. In 1956 she became a lecturer at University of Vienna and in the same year married historian Walter Wagner. In 1964 she presented to the International Congress of Art History in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...

her research on

early gothic architecture Early Gothic is the style of architecture that appeared in northern France, Normandy and then England between about 1130 and the mid-13th century. It combined and developed several key elements from earlier styles, particularly from Romanesque ...

in Italy and a paper on historicism which brought her to international attention. In 1971 Renate Wagner-Rieger was appointed full professor at University of Vienna, she was the first woman in the history department to hold this position. Wagner-Rieger paid particular attention to previously neglected and partially devalued era of Historicism in architecture (the breakdown in romantic historicism, strict historicism and late historicism stems from it) and important contributions towards the study of

Gründerzeit (; "founders' period") was the economic phase in 19th-century Germany and Austria before the great stock market crash of 1873. In Central Europe, the age of industrialisation had been taking place since the 1840s. That period is not precisely ...

. In 1968 she initiated the large-scale research project called " Wiener Ringstraße", also known as "The Ringstraße: Image of an Era: the expansion of the inner city of Vienna under Emperor Franz Joseph" which studied the ring road in the historic center of Vienna. Renate Wagner-Rieger died in Vienna, after a brief illness at age 59 on 11 December 1980.

Publications

* * Wagner-Rieger, Renate (1957) "The Vienna townhouse Baroque and Classicism" * Wagner-Rieger, Renate (1962) "The lock to Spittal an der Drau in Carinthia" * * Wagner-Rieger, Renate (1970) "Vienna's architecture in the 19th century" * * *

Literature

Awards and honors

* 1976: Prize of the City of Vienna for the Humanities (

Preis der Stadt Wien für Geisteswissenschaften Preis der Stadt Wien für Geisteswissenschaften or Prize of the City of Vienna for the Humanities is a prize awarded by the city of Vienna, Austria, awarded annually since 1947 for outstanding contributions in the humanities. It is worth 10,000 Eu ...

) *1998: Wagner-Rieger-Tor, passage from courtyard 8 to courtyard 9, within the “Gates of Remembrance” on the campus of the University of Vienna

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wagner-Rieger, Renate Austrian art historians 1921 births 1980 deaths Austrian women academics University of Vienna alumni Academic staff of the University of Vienna Women art historians 20th-century Austrian historians 20th-century women writers