This important critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, ...and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire .
Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere.
Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.
After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. ...Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.
In the multinational Austrian Empire, artists and their works travelled between different regions, from one national context to the next. This essay examines this complex network through the lens of ...the female ‘ideal portrait’, a genre ubiquitous at mid‐nineteenth‐century exhibitions. Tracing the trajectories of two Venetian painters – Natale Schiavoni and his pupil, Giacomo Marastoni – and investigating their career strategies, it argues that the transnational aspects of the two artists’ careers were mirrored in the way that their works engaged with national identity and international artistic forms. Visualizing ethnic difference in the form of idealized and sensualized female bodies, ideal portraits offered a way for artists to shape their own national ‘brands’ within the multinational art scene of the Empire. At the same time, the playful interchangeability of the women's costumes allows for an interpretation of ideal portraits as subverters of ‘organic’ conceptions of national identity.
This important critical study of the history of public art
museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider
history of European museums and collecting, their role as public
institutions, ...and their involvement in the complex cultural
politics of the Habsburg Empire.
Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and
Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the
evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from
the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere
Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of
Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source
materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise
of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between
the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and
multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures
to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum
collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged
with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled
shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional
practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition
of the public sphere.
Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating
study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by
students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of
Central Europe.
At the time of its revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, the Rococo style was suffused with often contradictory meanings. Regarded as both outdated and fashionable, Austrian and French, simple ...and pompous, superficial and full of spiritual value, it prompted musings on time, history, and national identity. Closely connected to both the decorative arts and the imagery of popular prints, paintings of the Rococo revival often evoked contemporary concerns about the commodification of art in the industrialized modern world. The ambiguous responses engendered by the Rococo gained special significance in the context of the political tension between Austria and Hungary.
The Upper-Hungarian Museum of Kassa/Kaschau/Košice was established in 1872 as one of the many ambitious but severely underfunded regional museums coming into being in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. ...This article examines how the museum negotiated the delicate balance between maintaining good relations with the capital, necessary for the sake of survival, and following its own local agenda. It discusses the history of the institution in the context of the complex political and administrative structure of Austria-Hungary, as an example of the dynamics between the Monarchy's "centers" and "peripheries." After 1867, Hungary's governments took the course of centralization, curtailing the political agency of the counties, while increasingly forcing non-Hungarian speakers in multi-ethnic regions such as Upper Hungary to adopt the Hungarian language. The article examines the museum's place in these processes, arguing that, rather than simply disseminating the narratives of the center, the museum conceptualized its own role in a more autonomous and multi-faceted way. Finally, it seeks to use the museum as an example of the "periphery" as an autonomous entity, and to question the usefulness of a simple binary of center and periphery in researching Austro-Hungarian culture.
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