Hans Sedlmayr (18 January 1896, in Szarvkő, Kingdom of Hungary – 9 July 1984, in Salzburg) was an Austrian art historian.
[2] After the loss of his first wife, Helene Fritz, in 1943 he married Maria von Schmedes, a well-known Austrian singer, whose discography contains many titles published in Nazi Germany.
Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (1948, "Loss of the Center: the Fine Arts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries as Symptom and Symbol of the Times"), published in English in 1957 as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center.
[6] In this book, Sedlmayr offers a "critique" of the spirit of the 19th Century, as revealed through the artwork created during that time period.
[10] Upon hearing the news of the assassination attempt by Johann Georg Elser against Adolf Hitler on 8 November 1939, Sedlmayr saluted his students during his lecture with the Hitler salute and called on his students at Vienna University to defeat the enemy and to denounce any attempt of resistance against the Nazi regime to the “police”, i.e. the Gestapo, and that he himself did so recently.
[2] In 1946, he began to publish in the Catholic review Wort und Wahrheit ("Word and Truth") under the pseudonym Hans Schwartz.