Erasures And Eradications In Modern Viennese Art Architecture And Design

Erasures and Eradications in Viennese Modern Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions and cultural-political meanings of Viennese Modernism. The book centers on three main erasures--the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; as well as erasures of race and other marginalized movements. The book's thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canonical 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 the second World War and into the present. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, sexual identity and political affiliation. Both well studied artists and organizations--such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund--are explored, as are lesser-known figures and movements. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history and European studies.

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.

This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna. Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating theories on memory studies, collective and public memory, and notions of "memoricide," this is the first book in English to focus on visual culture in the period when Austria was erased as a nation and incorporated into the Third Reich as "Ostmark." The organization, content and publications surrounding these three exhibits are explored in depth and set against the larger political changes and dangerous ideologies they reflect. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, cultural history, memory studies, art and politics and Holocaust studies.

In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna. Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution—the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism—instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction. In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust—a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.

The Covid-19 lockdowns caused people worldwide to be confined to their homes for longer and on a greater scale than ever before. This forced many unprecedented changes to the way we treat domestic space – as relationships shifted between the public and the private worlds, and homes were rapidly adapted to accommodate the additional roles of schools, offices, gyms, restaurants, making-spaces and more. Above all, our understanding of the home as a site to support and enhance the well-being of its inhabitants changed in a variety of novel ways. Interiors in the Era of Covid is a collection of essays which explore the complex ways in which our inside spaces (contemporary and historical) have responded to Covid-19 and other human crises. With case studies ranging from US and Europe to Japan, China, Colombia, and Bangladesh, this is a truly global work which examines wide-ranging subjects from home-working and home technologies, to the impact of lockdown on people's identities, gender roles in the home, and the realities of domestic living with Covid in refugee camps. Exploring the roles played by designers (both amateur and professional) in accommodating changing requirements and anticipating future ones – whether Covid or beyond – this book is a must-read for students and researchers in interior design, architecture, architectural and design history, and anyone interested in the home and the relationships between health and design.

How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West’s intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century? Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna’s rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.

Examining the history of altar decorations, this study of the visual liturgy grapples with many of the previous theoretical frameworks to reveal the evolution and function of these ritual objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book uses traditional art-historical methodologies and media technology theory to reexamine ritual objects. Previous analysis has not considered the in-between nature of these objects as deliberate and virtual conduits to the divine. The liturgy, the altarpiece, the altar environment, relics, and their reliquaries are media. In a series of case studies, several objects tell a different story about culture and society in medieval Europe. In essence, they reveal that media and media technologies generate and modulate the individual and collective structure of feelings of sacredness among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, early modern studies, and architectural history.

Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.