This anthology adds to ongoing efforts to revise longstanding perceptions of Viennese modernism as a cultural phenomenon defined by a limited number of artists, designers, and architects working at the turn of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. More specifically, as editors Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz argue, “the very phrase ‘Viennese Modernism’” has been “largely synonymous with the ‘holy trinities’”—the painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoscha, and Egon Schiele and the architects Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, and Otto Wagner (1). The editors' introduction surveys a series of major publications and exhibitions that, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, helped to enshrine this narrowly focused canon of figures while excluding or outright erasing the work of the many innovative artists, architects, and designers—and their advocates—who helped to make Vienna a vital site of modernist development from the fin-de-siècle through the interwar years and until the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany. While some elements of that narrative are accurate, the myth of “Vienna 1900” presents a sanitized, limited version of the far more complex and contradictory dimensions of the early twentieth-century Viennese artworld and Viennese society in general. This standard version, an important part of Austria's post-1945 heritage industry, has had dishonest, revisionist effects. As Morowitz states in her essay, “There is a rich historical irony . . . in seeing how the same decades erased or defamed by Nazi authors, historians and cultural leaders would in turn be used to erase the period of annexation into the Third Reich. What has been repressed and denied under the Nazis now came into service in the repression and denial of the years under the swastika” (39).
Focusing on the social, political, and cultural dynamics that have allowed the work of substantial numbers of Viennese modernists to be erased and eradicated, the assembled essays are organized into three thematic clusters that highlight what led to their absence from much of the post-1945 scholarship: antisemitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a lack of conformity to traditional art historical narratives and expectations.
In Part I, “Beyond Amnesia: Jewish Artists, Patrons and Critics,” authors investigate antisemitic attacks on modernism and, after the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938, the “Aryanization” of various modernist organizations, including the Secession. However, despite the Nazis’ many attacks on modernism as alien, or “Jewish,” not all Viennese modernist work was purged, nor were all Viennese modernists opposed to the ideals of the Nazis. Two of the articles here focus on prominent Viennese modernists who, having willingly accepted Nazi rule, continued their careers and produced work that conformed to Nazi expectations. Also discussed are examples of leading Viennese modernists whose works were reinterpreted or “Aryanized” to conform to Nazi standards. Other articles in this section explore the significance of Viennese Jews as creators, supporters, and disseminators of Viennese modernism, yet whose contributions have often been marginalized or outright destroyed.
In Part II, “Beyond the ‘Superstars,’” the articles focus on the consistent presence of women—artists, designers, writers, journalists, and patrons, among others—who participated actively in the creation of Viennese modernism, despite the sexism, misogyny, and antisemitism they faced, and yet whose work has, until relatively recently, been ignored or not yet rediscovered. These essays highlight the successes and challenges women modernists experienced, focusing on the importance of women artists' associations, as well as the innovative yet largely forgotten work produced by individual modernists.
Part 3, “Beyond Klimt: Erasures of Understudied Movements/Artists/Connections,” features five articles that examine ideas and objects of the study that have rarely, if ever, been studied in relation to Viennese modernism. These essays cover a wide range of subjects, including the ways European—especially Belgian—colonization of Africa allowed Klimt to absorb African influences that shaped his golden style and that financed the elaborate, costly frieze he designed for the Villa Stoclet; the Viennese reception of the American performer Josephine Baker; and the necessity of including churches designed by modernist architects in scholarship on Viennese modernism, despite that researchers have traditionally avoided studying them.
This book also includes an epilogue—a discussion the editors had with four members of the oldest Viennese associations for women artists, Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs, or VBKÖ (Association of Austrian Wom*n Artists). In its present incarnation, the association has focused on diversifying and democratizing its governing structure, and it directs its energies to “re-think[ing] current ways of knowledge creation and production in art-making in order to attend to gaps and silences in [their] own history and to decolonize the Association's imperial and colonial legacy” (241). The members acknowledge that such work is not easy. Even their attempts to research the Association's past are complicated by the many gaps in its own archive, making it difficult to piece together its history during the Nazi period, to understand past and present class dynamics of its members, or to address its complicity in colonialism. However, to meet those challenges, today's VBKÖ fosters projects that engage critically with their archive, acknowledging its incompleteness as well as the association's activities during the Nazi past.
The editors’ decision to conclude this anthology with the VBKÖ's discussion of their efforts to address archival gaps and confront problematic aspects of the association's history is strategic—it demonstrates that the task of revising misleading historical accounts is not solely the responsibility of dedicated academics but also of artists and others who understand the stakes and necessity of such rewriting.
