Matthew Rampley

Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna School

The standard narrative of the Vienna school of art history has cast its authors as cosmopolitan, progressive, and aesthetically liberal. Few have focused on the interrelation of the Vienna school and the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary. An exploration of the schools engagement with the Hapsburg Empires cosmopolitan ideology of “unity in diversity” reveals that Vienna school writings reproduce long-standing hierarchies in which Slav and Romanian art and culture were either dismissed or regarded as backward. Contrary to commonly held views of the Vienna school as progressive, its cosmopolitanism frequently propounded an imperialist outlook comparable to colonial attitudes elsewhere in Europe.

The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past

Abstract This key text offers the most extensive outline of Aby Warburg’s speculations about social memory, the origin of artistic expression and the psychological energies driving the history of European culture from classical antiquity onwards. According to Warburg, the conflicting responses to the legacy of classical antiquity directly informed the styles of the visual arts, from the realism of Netherlandish art to the heroic forms of the Italian Renaissance. Warburg’s theory of culture engages with Nietzsche’s ideas on classical antiquity, its legacy and the meaning of the Dionysus-Apollo duality. It is also informed by empathy theory, contemporary anthropological thought, evolutionary theory, the study of mythology, and biological conceptions of memory.

Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair

At midday on Thursday, 1 May 1873, the Emperor Francis Joseph I officially opened the Fifth Worlds Fair in Vienna. Timed to coincide with the emperors twenty-fifth anniversary, the fair aimed to confirm the status of Austria-Hungary as a major European power and as an advanced industrial and economic state. As the opening address of Archduke Karl Ludwig to the emperor asserted, the fair served to “direct the gaze of the world toward Austria and ensure the recognition of the participation of our fatherland in the promotion of the wellbeing of mankind through work and instruction.” Its significance was signalled by the presence at the opening ceremony of, among others, Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Edward Prince of Wales, and the Crown Prince of Denmark, with their spouses.

Art as a social system: The sociological aesthetics of Niklas Luhmann

The work of Niklas Luhmann represents perhaps the last major body of social theory of the twentieth century. Beginning with Social Theory or Social Technology: What Does Systems Research Achieve? jointly published with Jürgen Habermas in 1971, Luhmann spent the following three decades up until his death in 1998 laying out the basis for a comprehensive theory of social systems.1 The author of some sixty books and three hundred and eighty essays and articles, Luhmann has had an enormous impact on social and cultural theory in the German-speaking world. In Britain and North America, however, he remains a relatively marginal…

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

T he artistic and cultural life of A ustria 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 Viennas 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.