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Ernst Kris had his beginnings as an art historian when the coal shortage in Vienna during the first World War forced his school to part-time schedules. The young boy used the mornings so freed to attend art history lectures at the Vienna University. By his late
twenties he had published what was to become a standard text in its highly specialized field, a field too restricting for a mind like Kris's, Renaissance gems and intaglios. It was marriage that brought him into the contact with Freud's personal circle and its intellectual world that led him to undertake psychoanalytic training. The dual training produced, in time, classic studies on art and the creative imagination; the first was a study of the psychotic Austrian baroque sculptor, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt. Here, forty-five years after its original German publication and at last in English, is the second, Die Legende vom Kunstler: Ein historischer Versuch, its title rendered more cautiously explicit. That first edition, much sought after, has long disappeared; its ideas, if not their source, have become surprisingly familiar, particularly to readers of Kris's later psychoanalytic works or the studies of the Warburg group. Indeed, the volume is dedicated to the Warburg Institute.
Kurz, eight years Kris's junior, was an intellectual prodigy to match, himself at the start of a distinguished career when the two men joined their disparate but already formidable skills on this essay. Both had been students of Julius von Schlosser, both contributing editorial services to the Viennese professor's great survey of the art historical literature. Kris was already leading an astounding double life: eight hours a day an assistant curator at the Vienna Kunsthistorische Museum, he saw his psychoanalytic patients early and late. His interest had been stirred by a discovery he had made while working on the life of Messerschmidt. In his biography, he found embedded a legend—the start in life as youthful shepherd