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 insta...

Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of t...

Some of the most striking examples of modernist architecture are churches, yet they have seldom been subject to extended critical analysis. In this book, Matthew Rampley provides just such an analysis, focusing on the Catholic Church in interwar Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.A powerful institution in the Habsburg Empire, the Catholic Church continued to be a central social, political, and cultural agent after 1918, working in alliance with political parties and national gove...

The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect.Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas abou...

Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire is a study of museums of design and applied arts in Austria-Hungary from 1864 to 1914. The Museum for Art and Industry (now the Museum of Applied Arts) as well as its design school occupies a prominent place in the study.The book also gives equal attention to museums of design and applied arts in cities elsewhere in the Empire, such as Budapest Prague, Cracow, Brno and Zagreb. The book is shaped by two broad concerns:...

For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves?Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Köni...

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state. Newly written and researched by experts in their respective fields, individual chapters trace developments in German culture - including national identity, ...

With more than 1,100 entries written by an international group of over 150 contributors, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture brings together myriad strands of social, political and cultural life in the post-1945 German-speaking world.With a unique structure and format, an inclusive treatment of the concept of culture, and coverage of East, West and post-unification Germany, as well as Austria and Switzerland, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture

This volume critically investigates how art historians writing about Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with periodization.At the heart of much of their writing lay the ideological project of nation-building. Hence discourses around periodization – such as the mythicizing of certain periods, the invention of historical continuity and the assertion of national specificity – contributed strongly to identity construction. Central to...

A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons not been involved? This book uniquely treats Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a matter of Jews active fashioning of a new language to convey their aims of emancipation along with their claims of cultural authority. In this provocative reexamination of the roots of Viennese modernism, Elana...

At the end of the nineteenth century, Austro-Hungarian society was undergoing a significant re-evaluation of gender roles and identities. Debates on these issues revealed deep anxieties within the multi-ethnic empire that did not resolve themselves with its dissolution in 1918. Concepts of gender and modernity as defined by the Habsburg Monarchy were modified by the conservative, liberal, radical right-wing and Communist regimes that ruled the empire’s successor states in the twentieth cen...

The overwhelming majority of historical work on the late Habsburg Monarchy has focused primarily on national movements and ethnic conflicts, with the result that too little attention has been devoted to the state and ruling dynasty. This volume is the first of its kind to concentrate on attempts by the imperial government to generate a dynastic-oriented state patriotism in the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. It examines those forces in state and society which tended toward the promotion o...