An Insight into France Stele through his Early Adulthood Correspondence with Izidor Cankar

Abstract

The article deals with the correspondence between two key representatives of the Vienna School of Art History at the University of Ljubljana, France Stele and Izidor Cankar. The discussion follows their correspondence from the start of their studies until the end of 1913, and focuses on Stele’s editorial and public activities in the pre-WW1 period. Soon after enrolling at the University of Vienna, France Stele became the editor of Zora, a bulletin of the Catholic Academic Society Danica and invited Cankar, who was studying in Louvain, to participate. After 1911, when both studied in Vienna, Stele and Cankar directly addressed prejudice on the acceptance of modern art among Slovene Catholic scholars, especially in cases of contemporary church architecture. Stele’s essay “The Apology of Modern Art”, published in 1911, can be understood as his first direct application of the principles of the Vienna School of Art History. The content and critical responses to the article were not directly recorded in the preserved correspondence between Stele and Cankar; however, the way in which the two colleagues later complemented and supported one another is highly characteristic of how they also led public discourse.