ABSTRACT
THE TITLE OF RIEGL’S LITTLE BOOK OF 1894 is not easy to translate. The then meanings of folk art, which is marked out as the main word, will be explained a little more fully in the last part of this contribution. Hausfleiss means, literally, industriousness within the home, while Hausindustrie is a more straightforward economist’s term and can be rendered by domestic industries. Among Riegl’s books, Volkskunst is unusually fluently written; it can be taken as a tract, putting forward a single argument. This argument is not primarily an art historical one, but one of economic history. It was probably for this reason that Riegl thought the book needed no illustrations. The aim of the present short account of Riegl’s tract is, first, to present its contents, secondly, an attempt to place it into the context of Riegl’s thoughts and preoccupation’s of the mid-1890s generally and, thirdly, to assess its role within the Central European Volkskunst revival as a whole. 1
