At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud's investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this 'territory' in the ...Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character's interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travellers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers and royalty to tourists; in engaging with their histories, the contributors reveal the different ways in which madness was experienced and represented in 'Vienna 1900'.
Between 1896 and 1903, the 'School for Artistic Hand-Weaving' at Skærbæk/Scherrebek (Denmark) produced a series of Jugendstil tapestries that played a key role in late nineteenth-century German ...design reform and International Art Nouveau circles. At the time, the weaving school and its attached workshop were upheld as models of progressive weaving practices that consciously revived traditional techniques and folk motifs to create a distinctly modern design language. And yet, Skærbæk has since been virtually forgotten by design historians. This essay aims to redress this omission by consciously focusing on the creative, ideological and practical decisions involved in the production and reception of Skærbæk's tapestries. Shifting the focus away from celebrated Jugendstil designers and back onto shop floors and journal pages unveils fascinating insights into contemporary debates around issues of national identity, class and gender politics, and international reform initiatives.
In 1904, the Austrian sculptor Richard Luksch (1872––1936) produced two over-life-size ceramic figures of the female body for Josef Hoffmann's famous Kurhaus at the Purkersdorf Sanatorium located on ...the outskirts of Vienna. Despite Luksch's affiliation with one of central Europe's most progressive buildings of the time and his early involvement with the Viennese Workshops, these ceramics have been virtually written out of the history of Viennese modernism. This essay strives to reinsert Luksch's figures into this history by offering a new interpretation that contextualizes them as powerful articulations of a new type of femininity anchored in contemporary discourses on nerves and gender, namely, that of the femme fragile.
The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art ...form through which both objects and identities – social, political, and often non-conformist – are crafted. Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process – one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities. With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.
In 1899, the Haschhof Agricultural Colony was established on a hilltop as a satellite of the Provincial Insane Asylum at Kierling-Gugging near Klosterneuburg. At the Haschhof, patients and nurses ...lived in adapted buildings from a previously existing agricultural estate until a striking villa, designed by the architect Erich Gschöpf, opened in 1902. Using as a starting point the descriptions of the colony in the press as well as original photographs, this essay asks how contemporaries understood the Haschhof, and how psychiatrists wished it to be received and understood. It explores for the first time the history of the colony at the Haschhof and contextualizes its carefully conceived architecture, picturesque rural setting, paternalism, and agricultural work within larger psychiatric and cultural discourses. It is argued that the villa's architecture, as well as elements in the presentation and reception of both Kierling-Gugging and the Haschhof colony as a whole, contained allusions to contemporary German and Austrian Lebensreform. Although heterogeneous and often divergent in their ideologies and manifestations, late nineteenth-century Lebensreform movements and some of the more progressive reform impulses within Austria's Irrenpflege shared an idealistic belief in the curative potential of the land and labour. Yet, despite some strong superficial similarities between the two phenomena, on a deeper structural level, the Irrenkolonie and Lebensreform were fundamentally different. The Irrenkolonie operated from the top down, and embodied the vision of its founders and designers, which was then imposed on a passive, working-class, population. The Lebensreform settlements, on the other hand, were co-operative movements based on the equal participation of all its members, who were almost always middle class.
In 1876, Munich's renowned artist society Allotria organized an elaborate artists' festival that restaged the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's triumphant entry into Munich in 1530. This essay examines ...Allotria's 'Festzug Karl V' by drawing on some of its visual representations and explores how a specific moment from Germany's past was used to signal a particular national identity in Wilhelm I's young German Empire. Taking the Empire's specific sociopolitical context into account, this study suggests that Allotria's re-enactment of a historic event was neither a nostalgic turning to the past, nor simply a means to establish it as genealogy that linked late nineteenth-century citizens to what was now a celebrated moment of this past. Rather, the 'Festzug Karl V' is seen as facilitating active re-workings of this past in order to accommodate particular forms of self-representation crucial to some of the new sociopolitical realities of the German Empire.
In the above-quoted essay, Felix Salten – probably best known as the author ofBambi(1923) – commemorated the Austrian empress Elisabeth (1837–1898) as an isolated individual who spent the final ...decades of her life restlessly travelling through the Mediterranean. Salten used this text to project Elisabeth as an ethereal, misunderstood and ultimately tragic figure: ‘The Empress … has long escaped our grasp, she was the embodiment of someone who carried her way and well above the existence of others’.² Salten’s rhetoric formed part of a wider posthumous idealisation of the Empress first set into motion by her assassination in 1898
In 1884, Germany's leading illustrated weekly magazine, the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, published an article on the genre painter Eduard Grützner's recently completed residence in the Bavarian ...capital of Munich. The article opens with a set of seven xylographic vignettes that presented the building's historicist façade as well as six of its interior spaces, and the opulent nature of these interiors indicates Grützner's elevated status in the socio-economic fabric of late nineteenth-century Munich's art world. Any discussion of the complex interactions between late nineteenth-century design practices and modern identity must take into account Germany's social, political and economic landscape, and placed within this specific context, the visual and textual representation of Grützner's interiors in the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung elucidate some of the often-veiled mechanisms that contributed to the politicization of German culture during the first two decades of the young German Empire. The revival of a Renaissance past in German design practices should thus be understood as an active reworking of this past to accommodate particular forms of self-representation anchored in Germany's new social, political and economic realities. (Author abstract)
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