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From Potemkin Village to the Estrangement of Vision: Baroque Culture and Modernity in Austria before and after 1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Matthew Rampley
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The artistic and cultural life of Austria after World War I has often been presented in a gloomy light. As one contributor to a recent multivolume history of Austrian art commented, “the era between the two world wars is for long periods a time of indecision and fragmentation, of stagnation and loss of orientation … the 20 years of the First Republic of 1918–1938 did not provide a unified or convincing image.” For many this sense of disorientation and stagnation is symbolized poignantly by the deaths in 1918 of three leading creative figures of the modern period, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele, two of whom succumbed to the influenza epidemic of that year. According to this view, war not only led to the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy (and a dramatic political caesura), it also caused or, at the very least coincided with, a profound interruption to artistic life and brought Vienna's cultural preeminence in central Europe to an end. The inhabitants of the newly constituted Austrian Republic were forced to contend with significant challenges as to how they might relate to the recent past. On the one hand, some—including, most famously, Stefan Zweig—sought refuge in a twilight world of nostalgic memory; others, such as Adolf Loos, used the events of 1918 as the opportunity to advance a distinctively modernist agenda that sought to create maximum distance from the Habsburg monarchy.

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Articles
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Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 47 , April 2016 , pp. 167 - 187
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Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2016 

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References

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23 Adolf Loos, “Die potemkinsche Stadt” (1898), in Sämtliche Schriften, 2 vols., ed. Franz Glück (Vienna, 1962), 1:153–56, at 153–54.

24 Hans Tietze, Wien, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1923), 291.

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26 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1908), in Sämtliche Schriften, 1:276–88.

27 Ludwig Hevesi, Oesterreichische Kunst im 19. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1903).

28 Adolf Loos, “Der Staat und die Kunst” (1919), in Sämtliche Schriften, 1:352–54.

29 Eva Michel, “Große Vergangenheit: Das Barock und die österreichische Identitätskonstruktion in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Kampf um die Stadt: Politik, Kunst und Alltag um 1930, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Vienna, 2010), 230–34; and idem, “Barock von 1918 bis 1938: Katalysator und Legitimation der österreichischen Moderne,” in Barock since 1630, exh. cat., eds. Agnes Husslein-Arco, Georg Lechner, and Alexander Klee (Vienna, 2013), 66–77.

30 Hans Tietze, Wien, 147.

31 Cited in Michel, “Grosse Vergangenheit,” 230–31.

32 Ibid., 231.

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34 Anon., Das Barockmuseum im unteren Belvedere: Verzeichnis der Kunstwerke (Vienna, 1923).

35 According to the information provided in Franz Martin Haberditzl, Das Barockmuseum im unteren Belvedere (Vienna, 1934).

36 Hans Tietze, “Das Wiener Barockmuseum” (1924), in Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft 1910–54, 123–29, at 126–27.

37 Ibid, 127.

38 Eduard Stepan, ed., Wiener Museen (Vienna, 1925), viii.

39 Max Dvořák, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der barocken Deckenmalerei” (1919), in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte, ed. Johannes Wilde and Karl M. Swoboda (Munich, 1929), 227–41.

40 Hans Sedlmayr, Fischer von Erlach der ältere (Munich, 1925); idem, Die Architektur Borrominis (Berlin, 1930).

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43 Michael Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, 2000), 23.

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48 As Hofmannsthal claimed, “The land of Salzburg is the heart of the heart of Europe. It lies halfway between Switzerland and the Slavic lands, halfway between Germany of the north and Lombardic Italy; it lies in the center between north and south, between mountain and plain, between the heroic and the idyllic; its building lies between town and country, between ancient and modern, between princely baroque and the sweet eternally rustic. Mozart is the expression of all of this. Central Europe has no finer place; Mozart was destined to be born here.” Ibid, 181.

49 Hans Stiftegger (Brecka), Geliebte Scholle: Bauerngeschichten (Vienna, 1930); Guido Zernatto, Sinnlose Stadt: Roman eines einfachen Menschen (Leipzig, 1934).

50 Andrew Barker, “The Politics of Austrian Literature, 1927–1956,” in A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, ed. Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson, 107–26 (Rochester, 2006).

51 See Peter Grupp, Faszination Berg: Die Geschichte des Alpinismus (Vienna, 2008).

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57 Rudolf von Eitelberger, “Die Kunst-Entwicklung des heutigen Wien” (1877), in Gesammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften, vol. 1, Kunst und Künstler Wiens (Vienna, 1879), 1–36, at 30.

58 Karl von Lützow, “Wiens architektonische Entwicklung: Die Wiener Architektur des XIX. Jahrhundert,” in Die Österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild: Wien und Niederösterreich, part 1, Wien (Vienna, 1886), 70–90, at 70.

59 Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky, eds., The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York and Oxford, 2007).

60 On the history of the Burgtheater in the interwar period see Robert Pyrah, Burgtheater and Austrian Identity: Theatre and Cultural Politics in Vienna, 1918–38 (London, 2007).

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62 See Riegl's lectures on The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, trans. and ed. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte (Los Angeles, 2010). The lectures delivered in the 1890s were first published as Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom: Akademische Vorlesungen, ed. Arthur Burda and Max Dvořák (Vienna, 1908).

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65 Dvořák, “On El Greco and Mannerism,” 105.

66 Ibid, 108.

67 Dvořák, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der barocken Deckenmalerei Wiens,” 241.

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70 The major text in this regard was Sedlmayr's study Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (Zurich, 1950), in which he interpreted the Gothic cathedral as a mystical Gesamtkunstwerk. As Hans Belting observed in Die Deutschen und Ihre Kunst (Munich, 1992), after World War II the Holy Roman Empire was a politically acceptable surrogate for both the lost Habsburg Empire and the idea of a greater German Reich. See Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, trans. Scott Kleager (New Haven and London, 1998).

71 Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg, 1948).

72 Ibid., 227.

73 “This is the meaning of the baroque. Scornful hatred of life that recognises its folly and transcends it as meaningless, unreal, empty appearance, but then enjoys it again as empty appearance, with the inexpressible tenderness and fear of the artist who knows that it is just a matter of play, but who also knows that play is the only serious thing there is.” Hermann Bahr, Wien (Stuttgart, 1906), 62.

74 Hans Sedlmayr, “Bruegel's Macchia” (1934), trans. Frederick Schwartz, in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York, 2000), 323–76.

75 Vittorio Imbriani, Critica d'arte e prose narrative, ed. Gino Doria (Bari, 1937). The term was already being used by Vasari in the sixteenth century; Imbriani gave new life to the concept as part of the Italian response to Impressionism in the 1860s. See Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Italy (Chicago, 1993).

76 Sedlmayr, “Bruegel's Macchia,” 342.

77 Ibid, 354.

78 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928), trans. John Osborne (London, 2009).

79 Walter Benjamin, “The Rigorous Study of Art” (1934) in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, ed., Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 666–72.

80 Howard Caygill, “Walter Benjamin's Concept of Allegory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, eds. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge, 2010), 241–53.