The Memory Factory introduces an English-speaking public to the significant women artists of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, each chosen for her aesthetic innovations and participation in public exhibitions. These women played important public roles as exhibiting artists, both individually and in collectives, but this history has been silenced over time. Their stories show that the city of Vienna was contradictory and cosmopolitan: despite men-only policies in its main art institutions, it offered a myriad of unexpected ways for women artists to forge successful public careers. Women artists came from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. However, and especially because so many of the artists were Jewish, their contributions were actively obscured beginning in the late 1930s. Many had to flee Austria, losing their studios and lifework in the process. Some were killed in concentration camps.Along with the stories of individual women artists, the author reconstructs the history of separate women artists associations and their exhibitions. Chapters covering the careers of Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Bronica Koller, Helene Funke, and Teresa Ries (among others) point to a more integrated and cosmopolitan art world than previously thought; one where women became part of the avant-garde, accepted and even highlighted in major exhibitions at the Secession and with the Klimt group.
This is an excellent addition to the literature on fin-de-sicle Vienna, well-researched and well-argued. It highlights little-known artists and situates them in a novel interpretation of womens roles in the art world. The author challenges dominant tropes of feminist historiography and thus sheds new light on twentieth-century art history and historiography.”Michael Gubser, James Madison University
HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 2012.
Julie M. Johnson. The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of
Vienna 1900. West Lafayette Purdue University Press, 2012. 368 pp.
$35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55753-613-6.
Reviewed by Megan Brandow-Faller (City University of New York
(Kingsborough)
Published on HABSBURG (November, 2012)
Commissioned by Jonathan Kwan
_Frauenkunst_ and Its Discontents: Women Artists in the Circles of
the Vienna Secession
In 1916, when surmising the perils of separate women's art
institutions, an anonymous reviewer for one of Austria's leading
feminist periodicals quipped that "the best success that one might
wish of them [separate women's art exhibitions] is that they might no
longer be necessary."[1] Julie Johnson's important and meticulously
researched study of women artists in Viennese modernism lends support
to the idea that corrective exhibitions, institutions, and monographs
serve to ghettoize women artists from the art historical canon.[1]
_The Memory Factory_ flies in the face of feminist art historical
inquiries stressing women's difference and embeddedness within
separate institutions to argue that "women artists were not part of a
separate sphere, but integrated into the art exhibitionary complex of
Vienna" (pp. 4-5). Drawing case studies from five highly successful
women painters and sculptors closely connected to the Vienna
Secession (Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Broncia Koller, Helene
Funke, and Teresa Feodorowna Ries), Johnson refutes the
historiographical tendency to lump women artists into an aesthetic
"room of their own," seeking explanations for women artists'
canonical exclusion in "a new center ... whose themes have not always
fit into the dominant narrative structures of art history" (p. 111).
Such an approach, Johnson maintains, is not useful, for the art
historical "mothers" that she spotlights were leading practitioners
of the dominant strategies of modernism. Indeed, painters like Funke
and Koller often transmitted French postimpressionistic influences
ahead of their male colleagues, in a more purely autonomous manner
than Gustav Klimt and other allegorical painters, while exemplifying
the Vienna modernists' interest in psychological interiority and
nascent abstraction in the decorative. Johnson considers these
artists' erasure from the art historical record highly jarring given
that their life and work embodied textbook examples of misunderstood
modernist forerunners: i.e., stylistic innovation, run-ins with
conservative authorities, as well as acclaim abroad in advance of
recognition at home (for instance, the "skying" of Tina Blau's
masterful _Spring in the Prater _at the Austrian Artists' Guild in
1882). Similarly, Johnson shows how artistic personalities like
flamboyant Russian sculptor Teresa Ries created more than one
_succès de_ _scandale_, for instance the well-known anecdote of how
her delightfully provocative life-size marble sculpture of a witch
sharpening her toenails before the Sabbath attracted comment from
conservative emperor Franz Joseph. Today, however, Ries's works
remains buried in the basement of the Vienna City Museum Depot: a
poignant comment on the necessity of active scholarly intervention to
combat the invisibility of women artists' works. Johnson rightly
argues that Jewish women (including Ries) were strongly represented
in Viennese women's art institutions and this book serves to remind
the reader that fin-de-siècle Vienna is not a safe historical
landscape divorced from the exigencies of two world wars and the
_Anschluß_. On the contrary, as the author's final chapter on the
post-1938 erasure of these artists' lives and legacies, Vienna 1900
is much more caught up in the "unfinished business" of the Holocaust
than scholars have previously assumed.
Historiographically and theoretically, the _Memory Factory_ is
ambitious and complex, as evident in the book's richly documented
endnotes. The author draws more from the arsenal of memory and
_Vergangenheitsbewältigung_ studies than traditional feminist art
historical inquiry. In so doing, Johnson privileges not only formal
visual analysis, which indeed she does masterfully (on a par with the
sort of analysis pioneered by Griselda Pollock, Linda Nochlin, and
Norma Broude in studying nineteenth-century French painting), but she
also offers contextualized readings of non-visual sources such as
feuilletons, artist biographies, and humorous texts.
Making women artists visible in the post-Schorske dialogue on
Viennese modernism, a body of literature which has, according to the
author, "inadvertently reinforced the silencing of women's pasts" or
promoted false notions that women could not exhibit publicly
whatsoever, represents an important corrective, if only the tip of
the historiographical iceberg (p. 3). Carl Schorske's classic
_Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture_ attributed an
efflorescence of modern art, culture, and literature to the
disillusioned sons of liberalism who found meaning in an aesthetic
_Gefühlskultur._[2] For Schorske and his followers, the heroic trio
of Klimt-Schiele-Kokoschka exemplified a generational struggle that
exploded in Klimt's famous "walk out" from the conservative Austrian
Artists Guild to found the Vienna Secession (1897): an artists' union
dedicated to the philosophy of _Ver Sacrum_, the idea of art as a
sacred spring to rejuvenate modern life. Building on the pioneering
studies of Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Johnson's book is among the
first English-language works on women artists in the circles of the
Vienna Secession.[3]
Yet Johnson casts her net more broadly than merely speaking to
scholars interested in Vienna. The author rethinks the idea that
women artists were not active participants in shaping international
Modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg: the famous genealogy of an
increasingly abstract and autonomous art beginning with Édouard
Manet (one of the first painters to privilege the painted surface of
the canvas over naturalistic illusion) progressing through the
postimpressionists, down to Jackson Pollock and the heroes of
abstract impressionism. To begin with, as Johnson duly notes,
Greenberg's Franco-centric definition of Modernism does not fit the
Central European (particularly Viennese) context, which tended to
retain narrative elements and the decorative: a form of "nascent
abstraction [which] came to be seen as the opposite of Modernism"
precisely because of its frilly feminine connotations (p. 11). Here,
Viennese architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos's famous dictum
that "Wherever I abuse the everyday-use-object by ornamenting it, I
shorten its _life span_.... Only the whim and ambition of women can
be responsible for the murder of such material" comes to mind.[4]
Johnson's point is not only that Viennese modernism differed from the
cookie-cutter variety, but that imposing Franco-centric definitions
of Modernism on Vienna likewise marginalizes women's participation in
a distinct brand of modernism, never as autonomous or self-critical
of its medium as Greenberg would have liked. In this regard, Johnson
provides rich case studies of international Modernism's
cross-fertilization with the "homegrown" Viennese variety. For
example, the still-life represented a particular forte for
expressionist painter Helene Funke, paralleling the Fauves' and
Cubists' enthusiasm for this genre, whereas it tended to be neglected
by other Austro-German expressionists. Broncia Koller's work,
moreover, shows the local penchant for combining figuralism with
stylized surface decoration, mediated through references to Fauvism
and postimpressionism.
A broader critique in Johnson's work is how the seemingly
straightforward story of modern art presented in the "white cube"
space of museums has only served to reify both the "band of brothers"
modernist myth and its omission of women. As Johnson correctly
insists, "[t]oo often, the work is expected to rise to the surface on
its own, but curators (and art dealers) who serve as the gatekeepers
of art museums and gallery spaces have rarely acknowledged that the
space itself can enhance or alter the work of art itself" (p. 13). In
a scathing yet justified critique of an interview with curator Kirk
Varnadoe, in which issues of quality and stylistic innovation were
insinuated, Johnson pointed the finger at MoMA's complete exclusion
of women artists in its 1986 rendition of the "Vienna 1900" show.
Sadly, suggesting that the "necessary evil" of corrective studies is
still imperative, far too little has changed since 1986, as I argued
in reviewing the Neue Galerie's 2011 "Vienna 1900: Style and
Identity" show. Clearly, the issue is not quality but, as Johnson
accurately surmises, a lack of active scholarly and institutional
intervention in preserving the memory of women artists, an issue only
compounded by the destruction of works and sources during the world
wars.
Structurally, the book is divided into three parts. The first five
chapters spotlight successful women artists, highlighting their
public exhibitionary records and history of their posthumous erasure
from the limelight, which Johnson frames in terms of their exclusion
from paternalistic mythologies of father-son plots. The shorter
second section (chapters 5 and 6) offers a brief look at women's art
institutions, focusing on the critical reception of Association of
Austrian Women Artist's 1910 "Art of the Woman," a landmark
historical retrospective of women artists' works which dwarfed
Nochlin and Ann Sutherland-Harris's more famous 1977 retrospective.
Finally, the last chapter, "1900-1938: Erasure," takes strides to
retrieve Vienna 1900 from a historiographical no-man's-land distant
from the mid-century cataclysms, to trace the stories of women
artists in exile and under National Socialist persecution. Chapters
1, 4, and 6, previously published in article form, will be familiar
to readers already acquainted with Johnson's work, as is the
influence of her work on humor. Yet these chapters have been
significantly modified and read seamlessly within the context of the
book. It should be emphasized, however, that the de facto inclusion
of women artists that the author stresses was entirely informal.
Officially women remained barred from membership in the male artists'
leagues and lacked rights to sit on jury or hanging commissions; were
disadvantaged in being able to compete for scholarships and state
prizes (due to the timing of separate women's exhibitions); and
fought a long and bitter battle to gain admission to the Academy of
Fine Arts (1920/21). The major exception, as Johnson rightly
highlights, was the Klimt Group's progressive attitudes towards
including the art of women--and even children (for example, Franz
Cizek's influential _Jugendkunstkursen_ at the School of Applied
Arts)--in its exhibitions.
Johnson hits her stride in the formal visual analysis in chapter 1
("Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist's
Biography"), chapter 3 ("Broncia Koller and Interiority in Public Art
Exhibitions"), and chapter 5 ("Teresa Ries in the Memory Factory"),
which rank as the book's strongest. Johnson uses the example of
Austrian impressionist Tina Blau (1845-1916), well known in
German-language publications and exhibitions yet unfamiliar to
English-language audiences, to lay the foundations of her argument
that the Vienna Secession's construction of identity was self-serving
and paternalistic. Blau possessed all the qualities one might hope
for in a modernist forebear: the stylistic innovation found in her
brushwork capturing the transitory qualities of light and color; her
confrontations with conservative authorities; and her early success
abroad. Blau's most famous canvas,_ Spring at the Prater_, now
hanging prominently at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, proves her
point well. Almost rejected and then skyed at the 1882_
_Künstlerhaus exhibition for its daring impressionism and profusion
of light, only the comments of the French minister of fine arts
salvaged the picture from oblivion, to be eventually purchased for
the imperial collections. Overall, Johnson makes a convincing case
that Blau was selectively excluded from the Viennese modernist
ancestor cult because male Secessionists could not swallow the idea
of an "Old Mistress" as their artistic foremother, writing that "the
Secessionists ... never figured themselves as wrestling with or being
heirs to mothers" (p. 29). Worse, Blau has often been mistakenly
characterized as the student, rather than colleague, of Emil Jakob
Schindler, the landscape painter with whom she shared studio space at
the Prater. The fact that Blau was doubly Other in fin-de-siècle
Vienna, that is, as Woman and Jew, further problematized matters,
particularly after the Austrian institutions, including the Women's
Academy that she co-founded, were co-opted by National Socialists.
Johnson argues that during her own lifetime, as a successful public
artist fetching high prices, Blau consciously avoided connecting her
work to negative stereotypes (copying, impressionability,
fashionability) surrounding the feminine in art.
Johnson's further chapters masterfully compare the output of
once-prominent women artists to the works of their male colleagues,
likewise showing (as in the case of Blau) that women artists often
served as stylistic transmitters, disseminating the latest
developments in French postimpressionism among the Viennese
modernists. The chapters on Broncia Koller and expressionist Helene
Funke make excellent cases in point, although a paucity of surviving
biographical sources on Funke makes her portrayal slightly less meaty
than the others. Johnson's chapter on Koller, a Jewish painter siding
with the progressive Klimt Group after it seceded from the Vienna
Secession in 1905 and who was inaccurately memorialized as a
"painting housewife" due to her interest in interiority and active
role as patron, demonstrates the author's analysis at its most
original. In a manner reminiscent of feminist interpretations of
nineteenth-century French impressionism, in which feminist art
historians traced stylistic points of similarity and departure among
male and female artists, Johnson ingeniously traces Koller's
influence on younger artists, including Egon Schiele and Erwin Lang.
For instance, while Schiele's _Portrait of the Painter Hans Massmann
_(1909) has typically been read as nodding to Klimt's _Portrait of
Frietza Riedler_ (1908), Johnson's side-by-side comparison posits a
close connection to Koller's _My Mother_ (1907), unveiled at the 1908
Kunstschau exhibition, in its staging and stylized background.
Similar arguments are made regarding Koller's role in transmitting
Van Gogh-esque influences to a younger generation of modernists.
Ironically, Koller's work was more "Modern" (according to Greenberg's
definition of painting as a self-critical autonomous medium) than
that of her male colleagues. Yet, unlike traditional feminist inquiry
(for instance Linda Nochlin's famous re-reading of images of leisure
and work through the authorship of Morisot's brush), Johnson stresses
that "finding a new aesthetic or center is hardly necessary" for
Koller because her work reflected themes of psychological
interiority, long acknowledged by the Schorske school as an important
leitmotif of Viennese modernism (p. 112). Nonetheless, it is unclear
which definition of modernism/Modernism Johnson ultimately privileges
here--the more homegrown Viennese variety or the international
variant. Ultimately, Johnson uses the example of Koller to show how
women artists were integrated into mainstream male institutions,
their works influencing and influenced by their male colleagues; and,
moreover, in Koller's case, serving as an organizational mediator
after the postwar fissure of the Viennese institutional landscape.
Likewise playing a leading role in Viennese _Raumkunst_ (spatial or
installation art) was applied artist and sculptor Elena
Luksch-Makowsky, a frequent exhibitor at the Vienna Secession and
fellow participant in the 1908 Kunstschau.
In the second section (chapter 6, "Women as Public Artists in the
Institutional Landscape," and chapter 7, "The Ephemeral Museum of
Women Artists") Johnson unfortunately closes and opens the book on
separate women's art institutions all too quickly. She limits her
discussion of Austrian women's artist leagues to the prewar period,
focusing largely on feuiletonistic reactions to the Association's
landmark 1910 "Art of the Woman" show, implying that the leagues ran
out of creative gas after World War I. However, it was only in the
interwar period that Austria's women's art movement reached its
institutional zenith, propelled by the institutional parity achieved
by Vienna's Frauenakademie in 1919 and the founding of a "female
Secession," which mirrored earlier disagreements about the value of
the applied and fine arts (for example, the role of _Raumkunst,_ or
installation art, which had provoked a rift between the Klimt Group
and rump-Secession at the end of its "heroic" period). Moreover,
while Johnson cleverly compares the Association's "Art of the Woman"
exhibition to Nochlin and Sutherland Harris's better-known 1977
retrospective, the author's dismissal of the possibility of a
feminine aesthetic obscures further parallels between the early
twentieth-century Austrian and 1970s American feminist movements in
the arts. Applied artist and designer Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka
provocatively raised the notion of a separate feminine aesthetic in
founding the Wiener Frauenkunst in 1926, a radical offshoot from the
Association particularly emphasizing women's connection to the
decorative, applied arts, and the importance of _Raumkunst_, boldly
declaring that "we are of the opinion that works made by women's
hands bear the stamp of their female origins in and of
themselves."[5] While it is clear that the "Art of the Woman"
garnered misogynistic critical reactions which associated women's art
with copying, superficiality, and mere ornamentation, what was
ingenious about interwar Austria's female Secession's reaction to
such criticism was the way in which it reclaimed the discursive
territory surrounding _Frauenkunst_ and women's connection to the
decorative--and hurled such stereotypes back in the face of their
critics in a series of provocative public exhibitions in the 1920s
and 1930s focused around _Raumkunst_. Moreover, given that the lady
curators of the 1910 "Art of the Woman" show were notably silent on
the subject of female subjectivity, it is somewhat unclear how
Johnson concludes that "the women did not want to create a separatist
manifesto or credo" (p. 298). Overall, perhaps it would have been
useful to position the chapters on women's art institutions at the
beginning of the work, for if women artists were as fully integrated
into mainstream artistic life as Johnson's case studies would have us
believe, then this begs the question of why separate institutions
were even necessary. Was the Ministry of Education's support of such
leagues a red herring, that is, a measure ultimately designed to
cloister women at separate institutions, or did it fully support
gender mainstreaming? Why, if the misogynist criticism engendered by
"Art of the Woman" was as vehement as Johnson demonstrates, does the
author seem to imply that women's collectives were less dynamic than
the artistic boys' clubs that excluded them? Clearly, while Johnson
is correct in countering false notions that women artists lacked the
opportunity to exhibit their works publicly altogether, it is also
true that women artists could not become regular members (with voting
and jury rights) of the "Big Three" exhibition leagues until after
World War II. Thus, underlining the importance of creative
partnerships to Viennese modernism, most women who exhibited at the
Secession could only do so, to use Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber's
phrase, under a sort of "male protectionism" (through a connection to
male relatives who were members). While cleverly borrowing Kutman
Atalug's theories on identity and race, Johnson maintains that
sociocultural constructions of gender can indeed be described as a
jacket, manufactured by others, which one wears or not; some Austrian
women artists put on this jacket more often than Johnson is
comfortable admitting. Even "Old Mistress" Tina Blau was not immune
to perceptions that her paintings of the Prater reflected a certain
female subjectivity (at least as her colleague Richard Kauffungen at
the Women's Academy interpreted them).
Such issues raised by _The Memory Factory_ will surely stimulate
lively scholarly dialogues. It is to be hoped that further studies
like this will highlight women's contributions to the field of
early-twentieth-century applied arts, as well as the educational
backdrop underlying these developments. Johnson is dead-on when she
calls the separation of the decorative from the abstract one of
Modernism's "biggest blind spots," an observation equally relevant to
female handicraft tradition reclaimed by feminist activists (both in
interwar Vienna and the better-known American feminist art movement
of the 1970s). Here, given stereotypes of female "craftiness" and
domesticity Viennese critics viewed women as particularly "at home"
in the applied arts. Indeed, during the interwar years, the sort of
inventive, avant-garde _Kunstgewerbeweiber_ satirized in Joseph
Roth's _Emperor's Tomb_ achieved a certain expressivity in the
context of functional objects, undermining the notion that "to be
'high' and 'fine' both women and art should be beautiful, but not
useful or functional" (as Patricia Mainardi argued in the context of
American quilts).[7]
All in all, _The Memory Factory_ constitutes a tremendous
breakthrough on women artists in Vienna 1900, rethinking many of the
dominant paradigms of feminist inquiry and reframing the early
twentieth century as "hardly a monolithic culture of repression" (p.
14). It is as rich in documentation as it is in theory and secondary
literature, and raises many new questions not only relevant to
studies of Viennese modernism, but scholars interested in women art's
institutions more broadly.
Notes
[1]. Throughout the review "Modernism" refers to the version of
international Modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg, stressing
the increasingly autonomous (i.e., abstract) nature of modern
painting, whereas "modernism" refers to the Viennese home-grown
variant of these debates.
[2]. "VII. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen
Österreichs," _Der Bund_ 12, no. 2 (February 1917): 14.
[3]. Since the publication of Schorske's compelling essays, scholars
have revised and expanded aspects of the his "failure of liberalism"
paradigm, pointing to Schorske's neglect of imperial patronage, the
particularly Jewish character of Viennese modernism, and women's
contributions as artists and muses. See James Shedel, _Art and
Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna 1897-1914 _(Palo Alto:
Society for the Promotion of Science, 1981); Allan Janik and Stephen
Toulmin, _Wittgenstein's Vienna_ (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1973); Steven Beller, _Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Emil Brix and Lisa
Fischer, _Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne _(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997).
[4]. The author of numerous book chapters and articles on women
artists, Plakolm-Forsthuber is best known for _Künstlerinnen in
Österreich, 1897-1938 _(Vienna: Picus, 1994).
[5]. Adolf Loos, "Ornament und Erziehung," in _Trotzdem: Gesammelte
Schriften_ (Vienna: Prachner, 1997), 177.
[6]. Preface to the catalogue of the Verband bildender Künstlerinnen
und Kunsthandwerkerinnnen exhibit,_ Wiener Frauenkunst, in Wie Sieht
die Frau? May 17-June 29 1930_ (Wien: Jahoda & Siegel), 7.
[7]. Patricia Mainardi, "Quilts: The Great American Art,"_ Feminism
and Art History_, ed._ _Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York:
Harper and Row, 1982), 344.
Citation: Megan Brandow-Faller. Review of Johnson, Julie M., _The
Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900_.
HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 2012.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36900