Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design ed. by Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design ed. by Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz Alison Rose Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz, eds., Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture, and Design. New York: Routledge, 2023. 278 pp. Why are some artists included in the Vienna 1900 canon and others forgotten? How has the intense focus on Vienna 1900 led to the erasure of artists and artistic movements? These are some of the questions addressed in Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz's Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design. While Viennese artists who sympathized with the Nazis looked down on the turn-of-the-century period as "Jewish" and degenerate, the reckoning with history in the 1980s focusing on Vienna 1900 sought to reclaim links to Jewish culture without acknowledging its destruction. The romanticizing of Vienna 1900 and the project to deflect attention from the Nazi period has led some scholars to dismiss interwar developments, obscure continuities, and erase many important artists and their work. Intersectionality also plays a role in the erasure of many artists as their overlapping identities "rendered them especially vulnerable to marginalization or later eradication" (12). The book includes sections on Jewish erasures, gendered erasures, erasures of understudied artists and movements, and an epilogue connecting past erasures to the present-day aims of the VBKÖ (Association of Austrian Wom*n Artists). Contributors rethink themes such as the Jews' relationship to visual arts, women's contributions to interwar decorative arts, modernists' [End Page 109] attraction to African tribal culture and folk art, and the Aryanization of the Secession movement in the 1930s. Part 1 addresses the erasure of Viennese modernism's links to Austrofascism and National Socialism and of Jewish artists and buildings associated with Jewish life. Elana Shapira shows that Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann, who was promoted by Jewish patrons like Berta Zuckerkandl, "turned against his Jewish colleagues' progressive idea of Austrianism," embraced Austrofascism, and collaborated with Nazi officials (61); Laura Morowitz looks at the troubled relationship between Viennese modernism and reactionary politics; and Frances Tanzer explores Jewish refugee art dealer Otto Kallir's impact on the nostalgic understanding of Viennese modernism. Nathan Timpano and Steven Beller focus on the erasure of Viennese Jewish art and architecture. Timpano argues that Max Oppenheimer's obscurity resulted from accusations of forgery made by Oskar Kokoschka and his identity as a gay Jewish man, while Beller documents and explains the de-Judaizing of postwar Vienna's streetscape. Destroyed Jewish properties and buildings were not restituted or rebuilt in part because government officials did not want Viennese Jews to return. Part 2 looks at forgotten women artists of the Secession and interwar Vienna such as Broncia Koller-Pinell, Lilly Steiner, Grete Wolf Krakauer, Erika Giovanna Klien, Anna Lesznai, Gisela Urban, and Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska. Andrea Winklbauer highlights women artists and patrons in Schiele's circle and documents their disappearance from exhibitions resulting from the turn toward Expressionism. Rae Di Cicco shows that kineticist artists like Klien, who focused on movement and the body, have been left out because they don't fit into the Vienna 1900 paradigm. Julia Secklehner draws attention to Lesznai, a painter and craftswoman from a Hungarian Jewish family who was fascinated by folk art. Michelle Jackson-Beckett writes about Urban, a Viennese journalist and committee member of BEST, an interior design advice bureau, who argued that interior designers should seek input from homemakers. Though Urban joined the right-wing Vaterländische Front, she was deported to Theresienstadt due to her Jewish heritage and died there at the age of 72. Megan Brandow-Faller examines the life and work of Zweybrück-Prochaska, who engaged with folk art and promoted ideas of art education, child creativity, handicraft techniques, and traditional female art [End Page 110] forms such as embroidery and textiles and served as a link between Vienna and postwar America. Part 3 sheds light on several overlooked artists and movements. Debora Silverman's chapter on Klimt's Stoclet project as an ode to Belgian imperialism and Roman Horak's chapter on the racism in the Viennese response to French-American dancer Josephine Baker address...