1st Edition

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design

Edited By Megan Brandow-Faller, Laura Morowitz Copyright 2023
    278 Pages 10 Color & 38 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    278 Pages 10 Color & 38 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism.

    The book centers on three main erasures—the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, ethnic and sexual identity, and political affiliation. Both well-studied artists and organizations—such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund, and iconic figures such as Klimt and Hoffmann—are explored, as are lesser known figures and movements. The book’s thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canon of artists surrounding Viennese Modernism to offer original, nuanced, and rich readings of individual works, while offering a more diverse portrait of the period from 1890, through World War II and into the present.

    The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history, and European studies.

    Introduction

    PART 1: Beyond Amnesia: Jewish Artists, Patrons and Critics

    1. Art in Vienna 1900, or the Return of the Repressed

    Laura Morowitz

    2. Erasing "Jewish Traces": Max Oppenheimer and the Crux of Art Historiography

    Nathan J. Timpano

    3. "Our Great Josef Hoffmann": Undoing the Austrian Profile of a Celebrated Architect

    Elana Shapira

    4. The Emigration of Egon Schiele: Jewish Refugees and Austrian Modernism in New York

    Frances Tanzer

    5. As if They Were Never There: Vienna’s Cityscape and the Ethnic Cleansing of Memory

    Steven Beller

    PART 2: Beyond the "Superstars": Gendered Erasures

    6. Guests or Members? Women Artists in the Circle of Egon Schiele

    Andrea Winklbauer

    7. Across Stage, Page and Dance Floor: Asserting the Dynamic Female Body in Klien’s Kineticism

    Rae di Cicco

    8. The Birth of Painting from the Spirit of the Gingerbread: Anna Lesznai’s Hungarian Exotic in 1920s Vienna

    Julia Secklehner

    9. Who Knows BEST? Gendered Views of Interwar Design Reform and Wiener Wohnkultur

    Michelle Jackson-Beckett

    10. From Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America: Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska and the Cult of Creativity

    Megan Brandow-Faller

    PART 3: Beyond Klimt: Erasures of Understudied Movements/Artists/Connections

    11.Gold Rush, Congo Style: Gustav Klimt’s "Expectation and Fulfillment" in the Palais Stoclet

    Debora Silverman

    12. Good Art, Bad Art: The Culture Wars of Fin de Siécle Austria and Their Legacy

    James Shedel

    13. Robert Örley and the Other Wiener Moderne

    Christopher Long

    14. Josephine Baker in 1920s Vienna: Modernism, Blackness and Popular Culture

    Roman Horak

    15.  On Erasures in Modern Architecture: Catholic “Modernism” and the Historiography of Church Building Between the Wars

    Matthew Rampley

    PART 4: Epilogue: Past Erasures, Present Aims: The VBKÖ in 2022

    16. Speaking with Gaps and Silences in the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen* Österreichs (Austrian Association of Wom*n Artists): Introduction and Interview

    Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen* Österreichs (Austrian Association of Wom*n Artists)

    Biography

    Megan Brandow-Faller is Professor of History at City University of New York Kingsborough.

    Laura Morowitz is Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Arts at Wagner College.