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“The Streets of Vienna Are Paved with Culture, the Streets of Other Cities with Asphalt”: Museums and Material Culture in Vienna—A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2015

Abstract

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Article Commentary
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Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2015 

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References

1 For two recent exceptions, see: Yonan, Michael, “Kunsthistorisches Museum/Belvedere, Vienna: Dynasticism and the Function of Art,” in The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe, ed. Paul, Carole (Los Angeles, 2012), 167–89Google Scholar, and Rampley, Matthew, “Introduction: Museology in Central Europe,” Centropa 12, no. 2 (2012): 107–12Google Scholar. I would like to thank my academic host, Anita Aigner, and her home institution, the Technical University of Vienna, for providing research support for this introduction.

2 Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London/New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Sheehan, James, Museums in the German Art World (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Klonk, Charlotte, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven/London, 2009)Google Scholar. Andrew McClellan noted a “predominance of English-speaking authors” in museum studies in 2008 in “Museum Studies Now,” in Spectacle and Display, ed. Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen, originally published as Art History 30 no. 4 (2008): 9296 Google Scholar, at 92.

3 Duncan describes the resistance to a national art museum in the UK because of a concentration of power and wealth in country estates. Ibid., 34–37. In the United States, robber barons bought up European furniture and paintings to install in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at first as donor memorials to themselves, creating the unique situation where entire rococo bedroom sets were placed in the museum to commemorate its collector, over a century after the Louvre had separated such trappings of aristocracy from its galleries in keeping with the context of post-revolutionary France. Ibid., 65.

4 For example, see: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, ed., The Origins of the Albertina, Exh. Cat. Vienna Albertina, 14 Mar.–29 June 2014 (Ostfildern, 2014), which provides a new look at the collecting of Prince Albert and Maria Christina, whose role as collector and art lover was foundational for the gallery.

5 Hassmann, Elisabeth, “Quellen zur Geschichte der kaiserlichen Gemäldegalerie in Wien (1765–1787). Eine Chronologie zu der Aufstellung von Rosa und Mechel,” in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums, ed. Swoboda, Gudrun (Vienna, 2013), 133Google Scholar.

6 Swoboda, Gudrun, “Die Verdoppelte Galerie. Die Kunstsammlungen Kaiser Karls VI in der Wiener Stallburg und ihr Inventar,” in Die Galerie Kaiser Karls VI. in Wien, ed. Haag, Sabine and Swoboda, Gudrun (Vienna, 2010), 1213 Google Scholar. The first public art gallery in France opened at the Luxemburg Palace in 1750, in a display of one hundred paintings from the royal collection. McClellan, Andrew, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 2008), 118Google Scholar.

7 Bredekamp, Horst, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Brown, Allison (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar. The early modern display history of Austria is better covered in English-language publications, as, for example: Kaufmann, Thomas Da Costa, “From Treasury to Museum: The Collections of the Austrian Habsburgs,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. Elsner, John and Cardinal, Roger (London, 1994), 137–54Google Scholar.

8 Kraus, Karl, “Von den Sehenswürdigkeiten,” Die Fackel 10, no. 266 (30 Nov. 1908): 510 Google Scholar, at 8.

9 The process of exhibiting ethnicity helped to constitute the categories of ethnic groups, which ones were legitimate and which were merely subgroups of other groups. I am grateful to Pieter Judson for offering insights on this.

10 Tony Bennett first uses this term to refer to the inherent power structure in the architecture of display as a “vehicle for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power.” He goes so far as to suggest that visitors to the exhibitions—that is, the great unwashed public—imbibed a sense of being seen and therefore submitted to a new behavioral control (power from below model of Foucault): The exhibitionary complex and . . . its constituent institutions . . . sought also to allow the people to know and thence to regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-regulation.” The Birth of the Museum: History Theory, Politics (London/New York, 1995), 6163 Google Scholar.

11 Her research bears comparison to Timothy Mitchell's look at Orientalism in Paris, in which exhibitions were supposed to represent a reality beyond but “the real world they promised was not there” (450). The Paris exhibits constituted a simulacrum, a fantastic projection of the West's idea of the East recreated for show in the West. In one instance, the visiting Khedive of Egypt stayed in a fake medieval Egyptian palace at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, becoming part of the display as he received visitors “with medieval hospitality.” Mitchell, Timothy, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed. Preziosi, Donald and Farago, Claire J. (Aldershot, 2004), 442–61Google Scholar, at 445.

12 The 24-volume encyclopedia Kronprinzenwerk (The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures) issued from 1885 to 1902 also celebrated these differences, as did the Kaiser-Huldigungs-Festzug of 1908.

13 Telesko, Werner, Kurdiovsky, Richard, and Sachsenhofer, Dagmar, “The Vienna Hofburg between 1835 and 1918 – A Residence in the Conflicting Fields of Art, Politics and Representation,” Austrian History Yearbook 44 (2013): 3761 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 39, 45. Beatriz Colomina and Tag Gronberg view the tensions between privacy and publicity as primary concerns of the fin de siècle. Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar; Gronberg, Vienna City of Modernity, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar.

14 Kraus, 9. For connections between this theatrical self-display and tourism in Vienna, see: Steward, Jill, “‘Gruss aus Wien’: Urban Tourism in Austria-Hungary before the First World War,” in The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present, ed. Gee, Malcolm, Kirk, Tim, and Steward, Jill (Aldershot, 1999), 123–44Google Scholar, at 130.

15 Kraus, 8.

16 Telesko, et. al., 38–40.

17 Meijers, Debra J., “The Kaiserlich Königliche Gemäldegalerie in Vienna seen from an International Perspective. 1780 – 1855 – 1891: Its Architectural Setting and Museological Embedding,” in Swoboda, Gudrun, ed., Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums (Vienna, 2013), v. 2, 384405 Google Scholar.

18 The new museums “represented symbolically the extension of the ancient dynastic patrimony of art and science, of a huge cabinet of curiosities, from the court to the people of the modernized Empire.” Schorske, Carl E., “Museum in Contested Space: The Sword, the Scepter, and the Ring,” Thinking with History (Princeton, 1998), 106Google Scholar.

19 Meijers, 397, 400. This is not to say that other collectors have eschewed donor memorials, or collections that are kept together to refer back to their collector, rather than being distributed into a larger narrative of geography and time. See: Duncan, chap. 3 and 4 for coverage of what has been an enduring controversy associated with donor memorials in non-imperial times, when museums are expected to educate, enlighten, and exist for the public good.

20 Ibid., 113–14.

21 Julius Victor Berger, Patrons of the House of Habsburg, ceiling painting in the golden hall of the Kunstkammer, 1891. For color reproductions of the Kunstkammer objects, see: Haag, Sabine, ed., Habsburg Treasures (Vienna, 2013)Google Scholar.

22 Husslein-Arco, Agnes and Schoeller, Katharina, eds., Das Belvedere. Genese eines Museums (Vienna, 2011)Google Scholar; Prinz Eugen. Feldherr Philosoph und Kunstfreund, Exh. Cat. Vienna Belvedere Orangerie 11 Feb.–6 June 2010 (Vienna, 2010).

23 Meijers, 391.

24 Swoboda, 2010, 11–32.

25 Ferdinand Storffer, Neu eingerichtes Inventarium der Kayl. Bilder Gallerie in der Stallburg...1720–1728.

26 Swoboda, Gudrun, ed., Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums (Vienna, 2013)Google Scholar.

27 Yanni, Carla, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Johns Hopkins, 1999), 15Google Scholar.

28 Crane, Susan, ed., Museums and Memory (Palo Alto, 2000), 1Google Scholar.

29 Forster-Hahn, Françoise, “The Politics of Display or the Display of Politics?Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (June 1995): 174 Google Scholar.

30 Collectors were aware of the losses from the burning of Alexandria and considered the mind of the collector as a privileged site and potentially a more permanent repository. Paula Findlen, “The Modern Muses: Renaissance Collecting and the Cult of Remembrance,” in Crane, 161–78, at 178.

31 Anthony Grafton, “Introduction,” in Bredekamp, xiii.

32 Plakolm-Forsthuber, Sabine, Moderne Raumkunst. Wiener Ausstellungsbauten von 1898–1914 (Vienna, 1991)Google Scholar; Johnson, Julie M., The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 (West Lafayette, 2012), 215Google Scholar, 245–93.

33 The Liechtenstein Gallery had 2,451 visitors in July 1910, whereas the court museum (KHM) had only 1,807. In July 1911, there were 2,149 visitors to the Liechtenstein ,whereas the KHM had 1,450. “Der Fremdenbesuch Wiener Sehenswürdigikeiten,” Der Morgen, 28 Aug. 28, 1911, 2 as cited in ‘….zu was bin ich denn Fürst, wenn ich nicht geben kann’: Fürst Johann II von und zu Liechtenstein als Kunstmäzen 1840–1929,” in Johann II von und zu Liechtenstein. Ein Fürst beschenkt Wien. 1894–1916, ed. Kassal-Mikula, Renata, Exh. Cat. Vienna, Wienmuseum (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien), 13 Feb.–11 May 2003 (Vienna, 2003), 1112 Google Scholar.

34 Along with 18,000 natural history objects, the ethnographic collection was put on display in the Upper Belvedere when he returned from the voyage and then moved into the Palais Modena Este, making it the largest private museum in Vienna. The collection was moved to the Hofburg at the current site of the Weltmuseum, in 1909–1912. Franz is here! Franz Ferdinand und die Reise um die Erde. Exhibition Weltmuseum Wien. 9 Apr.–2 Nov. 1914. Also worth mentioning are the natural history, mineralogical, and botanical collections; the Egyptian antiquities were displayed with the plants in the “Brasilianisches Museum” before 1836. Meijers, 393.

35 The collection of the Josephinum remains intact and unaltered according to Wieber, Sabine, “A Beautiful Corpse: Vienna's Fascination with Death,” in Facing the Modern. The Portrait in Vienna 1900, ed. Blackshaw, Gemma, Exh. Cat. London, National Gallery, London, 9 Oct. 2013–12 Jan. 2014 (New Haven, 2013), 173–97Google Scholar, at 196.

36 Anna Artaker, “Rekonstruktion der Rothschild'schen Gemäldesammlung in Wien,” Arbeiterkammer Wien, 13 Nov. 2013–30 Apr. 2014.

37 Kos, Wolfgang and Gleis, Ralph, eds., Experiment Metropole. 1873: Wien und die Weltausstellung exh. Cat. Vienna, Wien Museum Karlsplatz 15 May–25 Sept. 2014 (Vienna, 2014)Google Scholar is another major exhibition about an exhibition, a fully contextualized presentation of the display, historical conditions, and long-lasting effects of the 1873 World's Fair. See also: Rampley, Matthew, “Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair,” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2001): 110–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 This reading of the mumok comes from Friedrich Achleitner, to whom I am grateful for sharing his 2001 typescript essay “Vom Donaukalk zur Basaltlava: Das mumok, eine Zeitmaschine?” For a close reading of the Leopold Museum, see Achleitner, “Gegensätze und Ambivalenzen/ Contrast and Ambivalence,” in MuseumsQuartier Wien: Die Architektur/ The Architecture, ed. Boeckl, Matthias (Vienna, 2001), 6567 Google Scholar. Achleitner's analysis of the architecture is covered at greater length in Johnson, Julie M., “The Embodied Gaze: Contemporary Art and the Museum Culture of Vienna,” in Blueprints for No-Man's Land: Connections in Contemporary Austrian Culture, ed. Stewart, Janet and Ward, Simon (Oxford, 2005), 2956 Google Scholar.

39 For a discussion of how this mix of times is embedded in the architectural history of Vienna, see: Achleitner, Friedrich, Die Rückwärtsgewandte Utopie: Motor des Fortschritts in der Wiener Architektur? (Vienna, 1994)Google Scholar.