Anny E. Popp, Art Historian of the Vienna School: Disappeared and Forgotten?

This essay explores the works of art historian Anny Edeltrauth Popp (1891–?). One of the leading experts of the 1920s and 1930s on Michelangelo and the art of the Italian Renaissance, Popp seems to have disappeared without a trace in 1936. In the years 1919–1922, she published several studies with a distinctive and inventive analytical-hermeneutical approach to art history; the studies themselves deal with Cézanne’s style, Ferdinand Hodler’s compositional principles, Donatello’s relief style, and two artistic methods that have come to be known as Steigerung and Akzentuierung (‘gradation’ and ‘accentuation’) in the art of ancient Egypt.