The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900

By Julie M. Johnson

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612492032

Book preview

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The Memory Factory

The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900

Central European Studies

Charles W. Ingrao, senior editor

Gary B. Cohen, editor

Franz A. J. Szabo, editor

The Memory Factory

The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900

Julie M. Johnson

Purdue University Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

Purdue University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided for this book by the College of Liberal and Fine Arts and the Department of Art and Art History of the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Cover image: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Travelers, 1938. Oil on canvas. The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London. Photograph courtesy of MLVM Trust.

Copyright 2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Julie M.

The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 / Julie M. Johnson.

p. cm. -- (Central European studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55753-613-6 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-224-7 (epdf) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-203-2 (epub) 1. Women artists--Austria--Vienna--Biography. 2. Art and society--Austria--Vienna--History--19th century. 3. Art and society--Austria--Vienna--History--20th century. I. Title.

N6811.J64 2012

704’.042092243613--dc23

[B]

2011047705

I dedicate this book to my daughter Isabel, with love and respect.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One

Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist’s Biography

Chapter Two

Elena Luksch-Makowsky and the New Spatial Aesthetic at the Vienna Secession

Chapter Three

Broncia Koller and Interiority in Public Art Exhibitions

Chapter Four

Rediscovering Helene Funke: The Invisible Foremother

Chapter Five

Teresa Ries in the Memory Factory

Chapter Six

Women as Public Artists in the Institutional Landscape

Chapter Seven

The Ephemeral Museum of Women Artists

Chapter Eight

1900-1938: Erasure

Appendix: Biographies

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Fig. 1. Teresa Ries, Lucifer, ca. 1897.

Fig. 2. Egon Schiele, The Roundtable, 1918.

Fig. 3. Tina Blau, View of Vienna, 1898.

Fig. 4. Tina Blau, Spring at the Prater, 1882.

Fig. 5. Josef Engelhart, The Cherry Picker, 1893.

Fig. 6. August Geigenberger, The Painting Dames in the Marées Exhibition, 1909.

Fig. 7. Tina Blau, Prater Spring, n.d.

Fig. 8. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, signature block and color woodcut, 1902.

Fig. 9. Josef Hoffmann, installation of Wiener Werkstätte objects with Elena Luksch-Makowsky’s silverwork, 1907.

Fig. 10. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Self-Portrait with Son Peter, 1901.

Fig. 11. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Adolescentia, 1903.

Fig. 12. Koloman Moser, installation, 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1901.

Fig. 13. Koloman Moser, installation, 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1901.

Fig. 14. Koloman Moser, installation with Klimt wall, 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1901.

Fig. 15. Koloman Moser, installation, 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1901.

Fig. 16. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, birth announcement for Peter Luksch, 1901.

Fig. 17. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait: Mother with Child, 1786.

Fig. 18. Koloman Moser, 13th exhibition of the Secession, 1902.

Fig. 19. Alfred Roller, cover of the first issue of Ver Sacrum, 1898.

Fig. 20. Ferdinand Hodler, Deep Emotion, 1901.

Fig. 21. Ilse Conrat, Wet Hair, 1900-01.

Fig. 22. Egon Schiele, Mother and Child (Madonna), ca. 1908.

Fig. 23. Josef Hoffmann, 14th Secession exhibition, 1902.

Fig. 24. Josef Hoffmann, 14th Secession exhibition, 1902.

Fig. 25. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Death and Time, 1902.

Fig. 26. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Sadko’s Viewing of the Brides, 1902.

Fig. 27. Maximilian Lenz, panel for Beethoven installation, 1902.

Fig. 28. Throne for Beethoven installation, 1902.

Fig. 29. Ferdinand Andri, primitive-looking finials, 1902.

Fig. 30. Josef Hoffmann, 14th Secession exhibition, 1902.

Fig. 31. Josef Hoffmann, 17th Secession exhibition, 1903.

Fig. 32. Josef Hoffmann, 17th Secession exhibition, 1903.

Fig. 33. Josef Hoffmann, 17th Secession exhibition, 1903.

Fig. 34. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Melpomene frieze, 1905.

Fig. 35. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Melpomene frieze, 1905.

Figs. 36, 37. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Melpomene and the Tragic Chorus, 1905.

Fig. 38. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, The Abbey of Thélème, 1908.

Fig. 39. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son, 1907.

Fig. 40. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, The Sauna is Our Second Mother, 1908.

Fig. 41. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Woman’s Fate, 1910-12.

Fig. 42. Elena Luksch-Makowsky, detail, Woman’s Fate, 1911-12.

Fig. 43. Broncia Koller, Interior in Oberwaltersdorf, after 1912.

Fig. 44. Broncia Koller, Seated Nude (Marietta), 1907.

Fig. 45. Broncia Koller, Still Life with Fruit and Parrot, 1910.

Fig. 46. Broncia Koller, My Mother, 1907.

Fig. 47. Egon Schiele, Portrait of the Painter Hans Massmann, 1909.

Fig. 48. Erwin Lang, Nude (Grete Wiesenthal), 1909.

Fig. 49. Broncia Koller, Portrait of Emilie Bittner, 1911.

Fig. 50. Vincent Van Gogh, Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle, 1889.

Fig. 51. Anton Peschka, Portrait of Egon Schiele, 1916.

Fig. 52. Koloman Moser, Kunstschau Painting Room, 1908.

Fig. 53. Koloman Moser, Kunstschau Sculpture Room, 1908.

Fig. 54. Josef Hoffmann, Kunstschau Wiener Werkstätte Room; ceramics by Berthold Löffler and Michael Powolny, 1908.

Fig. 55. Alfred Roller, Kunstschau detail, Theater Arts Room, 1908.

Fig. 56. Koloman Moser, Kunstschau Graphic Arts Room, 1908.

Fig. 57. Koloman Moser, Kunstschau Klimt Room, 1908.

Fig. 58. Broncia Koller, The Birdcage, 1907-08.

Fig. 59. Broncia Koller, The Harvest, 1908.

Fig. 60. Installation of the Koller-Shröder exhibition at the Galerie Miethke, 1911.

Fig. 61. Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912.

Fig. 62. Broncia Koller, Arco, 1910-12.

Fig. 63. Broncia Koller, The Last Judgement, 1903.

Fig. 64. Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Hugo Koller, 1918.

Fig. 65. Broncia Koller, Egon and Edith Schiele, ca. 1918.

Fig. 66. Helene Funke, Portrait of a Child (Child from Hungary), before 1910.

Fig. 67. Helene Funke, In the Boudoir, 1908-10.

Fig. 68. Photograph of Helene Funke on her studio terrace, 1913.

Fig. 69. Helene Funke, Still Life with Two Fish, 1920.

Fig. 70. Helene Funke, Still Life with Fruit and Vessels, 1931.

Fig. 71. Helene Funke, Peach Still Life, 1918.

Fig. 72. Helene Funke, Dancers, 1907-08.

Fig. 73. Helene Funke, In the Loge, 1904-07.

Fig. 74. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Loge, 1874.

Fig. 75. Helene Funke, The Dreamers, 1913.

Fig. 76. Helene Funke, Still Life with Rose Basket, 1910-19.

Fig. 77. Helene Funke, Still Life with Pheasant, Hunter’s Head, and Dog, 1922.

Fig. 78. Helene Funke, Still Life with Tropical Plants, 1910-19.

Fig. 79. Oskar Laske, Ship of Fools, 1923-49.

Fig. 80. Teresa Ries, Death, 1898.

Fig. 81. Teresa Ries, Eve, 1909.

Fig. 82. Teresa Ries, Witch, 1895.

Fig. 83. Teresa Ries, Sleepwalker, before 1894.

Fig. 84. Teresa Ries, Bust of Jaromir Mundy, 1897.

Fig. 85. Teresa Ries, Bust of Hans Wilczek, 1902.

Fig. 86. Teresa Ries, The Invincibles, 1900.

Fig. 87. Teresa Ries’s studio photographs, 1928.

Fig. 88. Elsa Kalmar von Köveshazi in her studio, n.d.

Fig. 89. Mark Twain in Teresa Ries’s studio, 1897.

Fig. 90. Teresa Ries, Self-Portrait, 1902.

Fig. 91. Teresa Ries, The Soul Returns to God, 1903.

Fig. 92. Teresa Ries, The Soul Returns to God, 1903.

Fig. 93. Teresa Ries, detail, Sleepwalker, before 1894.

Fig. 94. Teresa Ries, detail, Sleepwalker, before 1894.

Fig. 95. Teresa Ries, Penelope, ca. 1912.

Fig. 96. Ilse Conrat, Wisdom, ca. 1912.

Fig. 97. Ilse Conrat, detail, Wisdom, ca. 1912.

Fig. 98. Ilse Conrat, Laundress fountain in progress, ca. 1914.

Fig. 99. Josef Engelhart, Adam and Eve Fireplace, 1898.

Fig. 100. Poster for opening of Teresa Ries’s work, 1928.

Fig. 101. Teresa Ries, Eve, 1905.

Fig. 102. Teresa Ries, Witch, 1895.

Fig. 103. Olga Wisinger-Florian, At Breakfast in Karlsbad, 1895.

Fig. 104. Gustav Pisko in his salon, ca. 1911.

Fig. 105. Print Club logo.

Fig. 106. The Art of the Woman exhibition, Central Historical Room, 1910.

Fig. 107. The Art of the Woman exhibition, cross-shaped plan, 1910.

Fig. 108. Berthe Morisot, In the Garden, 1882.

Fig. 109. Eva Gonzalès, The Donkey Ride, 1880-82.

Fig. 110. Installation of the 16th exhibition of the Secession with Manet’s Portrait of Mlle E.G., 1870.

Fig. 111. Marguerite Gérard, The Triumph of Raton, n.d.

Fig. 112. Käthe Kollwitz, Unemployment, n.d.

Fig. 113. Catharina Sanders van Hemessen, Madonna and Child, n.d..

Fig. 114. Judith Leyster, Portrait of a Child, n.d.

Fig. 115. Ernestine Lohwag, Portrait of a Child, n.d.

Fig. 116. Lucia Fairchild Fuller, Portrait of a Child, n.d.

Fig. 117. Marie Cazin, The Nanny, n.d.

Fig. 118. Elisabeth Nourse, Procession in Brittany, n.d.

Fig. 119. Hermine Heller-Ostersetzer, Going to Church in Taufers, n.d.

Fig. 120. Angelika Kauffmann, Marital Happiness, n.d.

Fig. 121. Elisabetta Sirani, Martha Scolds Her Vain Sister, 1665.

Figs. 122, 123. The Art of the Woman installation, 1910.

Fig. 124. H. Albrecht, At the Exhibition, 1893.

Fig. 125. Trude Waehner, Self-Portrait in Dieulefît, ca. 1960.

Fig. 126. Trude Waehner, Golgotha or Auschwitz.

Fig. 127. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, This Is How the World Looks, My Child, 1930.

Fig. 128. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Interrogation I, 1934-38.

Fig. 129. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Travelers, 1938.

Fig. 130. Lilly Steiner, Baroque Composition, 1938.

Fig. 131. Nora Exner, Icarus, 1908.

Fig. 132. Ilse Conrat, Brahms Memorial, 1903.

Fig. 133. Antonio Canova, Tomb for Archduchess Maria Christina, 1798-1805.

Fig. 134. Ilse Conrat, Gerhardi Family Memorial, 1902.

Fig. 135. Ilse Conrat, Bust of Empress Elisabeth, 1907.

Fig. 136. Ilse Conrat, Bust of Empress Elisabeth, 1907.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the assistance of many, to whom I express my sincere gratitude. My first thanks go to Gary Cohen for supporting this project at Purdue University Press and for his erudite comments. Michael Gubser, who read the entire manuscript, also made excellent suggestions. I owe a debt of gratitude to the entire Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I cannot name them all here, but would like to single out Greg Elliott for his unwavering support and spectacular advocacy for this book. I am also indebted to Judy Sobré, who is a marvel in all things regarding art history, and to Kent Rush, for getting me started at UTSA. The brilliant artist Cornelia Swann and her team member Chris Castillo in the Visual Resource Center have helped me with images, always cheerfully and always delivering the best quality possible. Dan Gelo, Dean of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, provided financial support for color images, for which I am very grateful.

Chapters 1, 6, and 7 have their roots in my University of Chicago dissertation. I would therefore like to thank all of my teachers there; among those especially relevant for this project, Reinhold Heller, Martha Ward, Barbara Stafford, and the late Miriam Hansen stand out. At a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored postdoctoral seminar on gender and German studies organized by Biddy Martin of Cornell University, I received substantial advice and a new reading list from Dagmar Herzog. It was a relatively brief encounter that made a long-lasting difference.

Chapters 1, 4, and 7 have been previously published as Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist’s Biography, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 3 (Autumn 2005), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index. php/autumn05/208-writing-erasing-silencing-tina-blau-and-the-woman-artists-biographynineteenthcenturyworldwide.org; Rediscovering Helene Funke: The Invisible Foremother, Woman’s Art Journal 29, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2008): 33-40; and From Brocades to Silks and Powders: Women’s Art Exhibitions and the Formation of a Gendered Aesthetic in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Austrian History Yearbook 28 (Winter 1997): 269-92. They are reprinted here with permission. Chapter 7 has been significantly revised and updated. These chapters benefited from the editorial comments of outside readers. Chapters 3 and 4 also benefited from audience comments at presentations at annual meetings of the College Art Association.

Much of the primary research was conducted with funding from the Austrian Fulbright Commission and the University of Chicago. In Vienna, I thank especially Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber and Jenö Eisenberger for sharing research materials. Plakolm-Forsthuber has pioneered research on women artists in Austria, and has been a beacon of scholarly generosity over the years. As a fellow researcher in the field, I especially appreciate her ability to find hidden documents and lost works of art and to solve mysteries in uncharted territories. Another debt of gratitude goes to the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK), Vienna’s Institute for Cultural Studies, and its wonderful staff and scholars. Particularly helpful in regard to this project has been one of its affiliated scholars, Heidemarie Uhl, who has done much to establish the field of memory and history in Austria.

To the many collectors, heirs, and institutions who gave me permission to reproduce images, I am very grateful. Thanks to Athina Chadzis, who helped me find the heirs and images for Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and to the Eisenberger family, who provided images of paintings from The Eisenberger Collection. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists in Vienna, including the friendly staffs at the Bildarchiv, the Belvedere, the Liechtenstein Archive, the Literaturarchiv, the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, the Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. At Purdue University Press, I would also like to thank Charles Watkinson, Becki Corbin, and last but not least, Dianna Gilroy.

A final note of thanks for my family: to Felix Tweraser, my first reader, I give my undying gratitude. Kurt and Gene Tweraser and my parents, Harvey and Barbara Johnson, have done much to help this project along, more than I could ever repay.

Foreword

Although studies of the cultural life of Vienna 1900 have become a veritable industry over the last thirty years, there is still much to be uncovered and analyzed about the development of art, literature, scholarship, science, and popular culture in that rich milieu. Julie M. Johnson’s The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 presents a rich, multifaceted examination of Viennese women artists from the end of the nineteenth century into the era of the first Austrian Republic. It is indeed striking that in the large body of work on modernist culture in early twentieth-century Vienna, little has been written outside of specialist studies in art history on any of the visual artists beyond the painters Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka and the designers Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann. These were all towering figures who deserve close attention, but their milieu included other significant figures, among them a number of women of striking originality who contributed much to Viennese and Austrian artistic life at the time and to the development of early twentieth-century modernist art.

The work of Tina Blau, Ilse Conrat, Helene Funke, Broncia Koller, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Teresa Ries, and others attracted much attention in artistic circles in early twentieth-century Vienna and deserves serious examination now. That we know little or nothing about the women artists derives not merely, though, from scholars of Vienna 1900 focusing on first-rank figures such as Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Moser, and Hoffmann. As Johnson convincingly demonstrates, a number of them were celebrated at the beginning of the century; but then a sustained process of erasure set in, reaching a peak after the Anschluss in 1938. The systematic forgetting denied the importance of the women artists’ work and ultimately largely excluded them, as women, from any broader discussion of Viennese and Central European artistic life.

Johnson’s study encompasses several projects. It recovers the work of Vienna’s women artists and places them back in the artistic and cultural life of their time and place. Johnson also analyzes closely the reception of these artists’ works, their display in exhibitions and galleries, and their treatment in criticism and surveys of art of the time and later. That analysis shows vividly how the gender politics of producing art criticism and eventually writing art history worked to denigrate the work of the women artists and eventually to erase much of their contributions from memory. This book contributes much that is new to our appreciation of the breadth and richness of early twentieth-century modernist art in Vienna and to our understanding of how gender politics can affect the exhibiting of art, producing art criticism, and constructing canons and narratives in art history. Readers interested in Viennese and Austrian cultural history, the history of modern art, the development of art history as a discipline, gender studies, and cultural studies will find much of interest here.

—Gary B. Cohen

Series Editor

Introduction

Too much Feodorowna Ries! A windstorm of publicity is blowing through the Viennese leaflet-woods.¹ This was Karl Kraus’s complaint on the media interest that sculptor Teresa Ries (1874-1956) attracted when she opened her atelier at the Palais Liechtenstein to a ten-year show of her work. Ries, who won the admiration of Mark Twain and Stefan Zweig for her life-size sculpture of Lucifer (fig. 1), was once so well known that she was caricatured in a play by Roda Roda, whose works were often shown at the Cabaret Fledermaus.² Before they seceded, Gustav Klimt and members of his group visited her in her studio to invite her to exhibit with their new Secession³ instead of at the Künstlerhaus. She never appeared as an official member of the group because of her gender, but she essentially seceded with the Klimt group and remained loyal to them. This once-famous artist, who had won medals, public commissions, and the admiration of other artists, is now forgotten—a fate that has turned out to be the rule rather than the exception for women artists working in Vienna 1900.⁴

Ries was just one of several women who 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. During the fin de siècle, it attracted women artists from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. Because so many of the artists were Jewish women, a large portion of their records was actively silenced, beginning in the late 1930s. Many had to flee Austria, losing their studios and lifework in the process (such was Ries’s fate). Some were killed in concentration camps. It was not only Jewish women artists who were affected—the personal papers and documentation of Expressionist Helene Funke (1869-1957), for example, were destroyed by Allied bombing. The erasures of the 1930s and 1940s have made it difficult to imagine how vibrant and successful women were as public artists in imperial Vienna.

Fig. 1. Teresa Ries, Lucifer. ca. 1897. Life-size plaster figure. As pictured in her autobiography, Die Sprache des Steines (Vienna: Krystall Verlag, 1928), 107. Destroyed in 1940s.

Women artists have not been included in the best-known histories of the period. Carl Schorske’s 1980 Fin-de-Siècle Vienna emphasized stories of generational tension between fathers and sons and bands of brothers (in institutions, in visual culture, and in artists’ self-representations). In his reading of Klimt, the artist retreated to an art of interiority after the famous ceiling painting crisis, in which a university faculty and the Ministry of Religion and Education tried to interfere with his compositions.⁵ The Klimt story was part of a larger argument that showed a generation of writers and intellectuals who identified with aristocratic values, and who, when political liberalism declined, retreated to the realm of the aesthetic, creating a brilliant culture. Steven Beller argued in 1989 that the creative milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna was not a universal model applicable to other cultures, but that it was specific to Vienna, and primarily Jewish—he included all art forms except the visual arts, where the dominant figures, Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos were not Jewish.⁶ In their opposing explanatory models of creativity, both Schorske and Beller inadvertently reinforced the silencing of women’s pasts. This study is based on new research, documentation, and in some cases, artists who had not yet been rediscovered when Schorske and Beller wrote their now classic studies.

On an institutional level, the now-forgotten Print Club, Radierklub der Wiener Künstlerinnen, headed by Marie Adler, had many Jewish women artists as members, including Lilly Steiner (1884-1961).⁷ The club came from the first graduating class of the Art School for Women and Girls, an institution that was closed in 1938 for being primarily Jewish.⁸ The Art School for Women and Girls (Kunstschule) was completely forgotten until 1994, when Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber published Künstlerinnen, a comprehensive account of women artists from 1890-1938.⁹ Yet it was an important institution for modern art: the faculty included Secessionists Adolf Böhm and Moser, and it attracted students who would become important artists, among them Broncia Koller. Secessionists who taught at the School of Applied Arts often held prior posts at the Kunstschule. The faculty and students of both schools frequently exhibited their work in Vienna, and collaborated at the 1908 Kunstschau. The first graduates created, with Moser, the innovative display organization Wiener Kunst im Hause, which in turn spawned the Wiener Werkstätte, where many artists were not only women but also Jewish. This information would alter Beller’s argument that the Wiener Werkstätte was not primarily Jewish except for its patron base, and bolster his overall thesis that the creativity of Vienna was due in great part to its assimilated Jewish population.

The title of this book, The Memory Factory, refers to Vienna as a site for fabricating history. Vienna was indeed a place where intellectuals and artists thought with history, and participated in providing their own historical narratives.¹⁰ Robert Musil and Alois Riegl noted early on that the Viennese had a proclivity for commemoration and creating monuments.¹¹ The title also refers to my method, which depends more on work done in memory studies and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past) than on approaches that feminists have used in questioning the canon to find alternative aesthetic values. Because these women were leading practitioners of the dominant strategies of modernism and the Viennese interest in interiority, the feminist approaches to art history—to look for reasons why they were excluded from the canon in their aesthetic differences—is not helpful. A canon, in art history, is a virtual museum of works deemed worth remembering. But the canon’s very existence depends upon silencing the things on its periphery. Any center, as historian Joan W. Scott remarks, rests on—contains—repressed or negated material and so is unstable, not unified.¹² Recent art historical studies have shown that the aesthetic values of the modernist canon were expressed as well by women artists as by some of the established male heroes of the history of art. Women artists therefore make visible the instability and disunity of the dominant canonical system. But this is no reason to reject the canon; the problem with rejecting canons altogether is that they represent the successful repetitions of history. Such repetitions are made through reproduction, emulation by other artists, inclusion in histories of the period, and monographs.

The rediscoveries of many women artists have been initiated by artists who were searching for art historical mothers with whom to identify.¹³ Indeed, Scott believes that all history writing depends upon identification—a selective delving into the past—in a process that uses fantasy to create coherence out of chaos.¹⁴ The repetitions, or echoes, of history are part of this process: there are inevitable distortions that occur over time and over the generations, but identification is required for these repetitions to take place. This is as true for the established canon as it is for new research on women artists. New research in the field of art history is also showing that reproduction (a significant form of repetition for artists) adds to the aura of a work of art.¹⁵ For example, the number of catalogues raisonnés, trade books, museum exhibition catalogues, and monographs devoted to Egon Schiele is staggering in comparison to the meager output on Broncia Koller (about whom there is nothing in English). The memory gap has become so exaggerated that a false picture of the past has emerged, one in which women’s participation has become nearly invisible. Such examples from the discipline of art history support the proposal of some historians that memory is by definition repetition.¹⁶ Repeated similar omissions in studies of the period have led to the mistaken conclusion that women were not allowed to exhibit their works publicly.¹⁷

Because the silencing of women’s history was so extreme in the mid-twentieth century, corrective exhibitions, institutions, and monographs have been necessary. But monographs and separate studies of women artists are not enough, in my estimation. The purpose of this study is to show that women artists were not part of a separate sphere, but integrated into the art exhibitionary complex of Vienna. This included not just the Secession and the Künstlerhaus, but art dealer salons and alternative exhibition sites. Works of art by women were often displayed in the Secession, Vienna’s most elite space. Amelia Levetus reported on one members only exhibition, for example, in which she highlighted Elena Luksch-Makowsky’s contribution in the foyer, and works by Elsa Kalmar von Köveshazi and Teresa Ries.¹⁸ But the evidence of their paintings, sculptures, and works on paper has been missing from histories of the period. The result has reinforced false ideas about the separate spheres model as it applies to fin-de-siècle Vienna and its aesthetics. The separate spheres model is predicated on a power structure in which bourgeois women are relegated to the home, and the public is the realm of men or fallen women. This model, applied by Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin to the French art of the nineteenth century to explain the aesthetics of Impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt (neither of whom painted nudes, for example), does not apply to the Central European context, in which a much more class-diverse pool of women became artists.

Artists profiled in individual chapters were chosen for their aesthetic innovations and public exhibition records, not a particular aspect of their identity. Of these women, three were Jewish: Tina Blau, Broncia Koller, and Teresa Ries. Elena Luksch-Makowsky and Helene Funke immigrated to Vienna from bordering countries Russia and Germany (as did Ries). These artists were active during the fin de siècle, their lives disrupted after they established careers. Younger artists, like Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996), are no less important aesthetically, but emigrated before establishing an exhibition reputation. Expressionists Helene von Taussig (1879-1942) and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) were killed in concentration camps. These artists are briefly discussed in chapter 8, 1900/1938: Erasure.

The gap between the fame and the subsequent oblivion of these artists is remarkable. Reasons for their erasure are easily uncovered in the fin de siècle—in exclusionary exhibition and union policies or misogynist art criticism. But this is only part of the picture. While there was evidence of gender prejudice in both the institutional and discursive realms, the gender dynamic was complicated by the social life of an imperial city, where women could be very powerful. Far from a history of mere exclusion and gender prejudice, this book also uncovers a surprising hidden history in which the Ministry of Religion and Education not only purchased works by women but gave support to the new women’s unions formed after 1901. Women in artist associations were treated almost as official ambassadors by the Habsburg state, while men in some artist associations were not allowed to represent themselves as Austrians abroad.

Perhaps more remarkable, historical women artists were once household names in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Why else would pseudoscientists Otto Weininger and Paul Möbius refer to historical women artists so often as proofs of their theories about genius and gender? Because of this known tradition, two women artists were able to quickly assemble an international retrospective of historical women artists that took place at the Secession in 1910, where there were over 300 works of art covering the Renaissance to the present. Though now forgotten, it was remarkably similar to the famous 1977 exhibition (curated by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris) of women artists from the Renaissance to the 1950s. The 1977 exhibition is credited with launching new research that has led to changes in the canon, now visible in the inclusion of women artists in survey books and virtual memory systems for students of art history.¹⁹ Nochlin and Sutherland Harris spent five years researching and organizing their exhibition; Nochlin, a pioneer teacher of courses on women and gender issues, also reported having to start from scratch.²⁰ By contrast, the two artists who curated the 1910 exhibition put a similar show together in six months. Far from having to start from scratch, they had access to many books on historical women artists in the German language. In this, fin-de-siècle Vienna differed from postmodern America, where the 1977 women’s retrospective exhibition was greeted with surprise that there were great women artists.²¹ The cultural memory of women artists had been erased for Nochlin and Sutherland Harris, who felt they were working in a historical vacuum.

The title The Memory Factory thus refers not only to the process of creating memory, but also to its erasure. Belated memory (related to problems in overcoming the past) has much to do with the dearth of scholarship on these women artists, as well as their exclusion—not from the historical world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, but from the secondary literature on it. Chapter 1 is about the writing of biography in the case of Tina Blau, and chapter 8 takes up the theme of writing and memory again. By comparing the fate of Ilse Conrat, who committed suicide to avoid deportation in 1942, to Josef Engelhart, one-time president of the Secession, whose memoirs were published in 1943, I show how such published sources have shaped our knowledge of this period, while the stories of artists like Conrat, arguably a much more important sculptor, have yet to be told.²² Engelhart’s version of Secession history is often repeated in secondary literature and museum exhibitions, while Conrat’s story has virtually disappeared. Engelhart claimed, for example, that his painting of a nude caused the initial scandal that led to the secession from the Künstlerhaus.²³ This story has contributed to misreadings on how nudes were received in Vienna 1900. Most of the women artists in this study, including Conrat, painted or sculpted nudes, a traditional genre in the history of art.

Compounding the problem for women artists from fin-de-siècle Vienna is the unusual ability of its artists to mythologize their own pasts. French artist Paul Gauguin merely fabricated (and plagiarized) his diaries, while painting extremely selective images of a colonialized Tahiti.²⁴ In Vienna, on the other hand, the Secessionists were in charge of their own exhibition house and in-house magazine. These powerful tools have formed a layer of historical documentation that still troubles historians today.²⁵ The Secessionists staged themselves as heirs to the historical avant-garde in exhibitions, while Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka represented themselves in allegorical form in paintings and posters. Such visual representations have been mistaken as documentation of the real world rather than as the fictional worlds of artists who identified with biblical and mythological stories. Schiele, for example, depicted his circle of artist friends as a last supper image; it made an ingenious poster for his one-person exhibition at the Secession in 1918 (fig. 2). Broncia Koller, who was a friend, mentor, and patron to Schiele, was subsequently excluded from a recent Belvedere exhibition devoted to his friends (The Roundtable: Egon Schiele and His Circle) because the exhibition organizers used the poster image as their point of departure.²⁶ Yet there was every reason to include Koller as one of Schiele’s artist friends in the Roundtable exhibition. Such separations of women from men artists in recent exhibitions constitutes a further erasure, making women more vulnerable to being forgotten or part of a cycle of rediscoveries. This study restores these women to an integrated, active role in fin-de-siècle Vienna and shows the culture to be much more cosmopolitan, varied, and sophisticated than previous accounts have allowed.

Fig. 2. Egon Schiele, The Roundtable, 1918. Color lithography, 68 x 53 cm. Poster for 49th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, 1918. Wien Museum. ÖNB/Vienna D18859B.

Instead of focusing on artist’s representations of the past, this study covers the institutional and exhibition history of women’s and men’s unions, including a thorough examination of the funding policies of the Ministry of Religion and Education toward art unions. Newspaper feuilletons, exhibition reviews, catalogues, and sales of works to the Modern Gallery all reveal that women artists were very present in public exhibitions. Women garnered support from aristocrats and bureaucrats, and also were present in solo exhibitions at art dealer salons and as participants at the Secession and later groups organized by Klimt. Much of the territory is familiar, but seen from a different point of view, with a focus on readings of works by women within their installation contexts, including the 1902 Beethoven exhibition and the 1908 Kunstschau. In addition to the traditional materials of art and visual culture, my method is based on contextualized readings of sources like artist biographies, art criticism, and jokes, which should not be read as unmediated evidence. In Vienna, for example, art critics were typically pro-artist or pro-audience (taking the role of the befuddled and amused or shocked onlooker). Jokes that mocked the easy popularity of the Secession were suppressed by chronicler Hermann Bahr, while he highlighted stories of scandal surrounding their nudes. The first layer of documentation, then, already contained within it a silencing.²⁷ Throughout this study, the conditions by which artist’s reputations were made, erased, and remade are considered. The erasures were at times literal, and at other times much more subtle and complicated, as in the cases of Broncia Koller and Helene Funke.

Although such a corrective study as this one is necessary, the women profiled in this book were not part of one cozy little world.²⁸ Individual women artists allied themselves with various intellectual circles in Vienna. These identities, based on affinity, were much more important to these women than being a woman artist or being Jewish, if their personal diaries and letters are any indication. Koller and Conrat, both assimilated Jews devoted to German culture, belonged to different circles: Conrat’s family was associated with the Brahms circle, while Koller met her husband in the Bruckner circle, which shared an antipathy for Brahms.²⁹ Koller was not only friends with the great feminist intellectuals of Vienna (Rosa Mayreder, Marie Lang, and Lou Andreas-Salomé), but was known to sit at the Café Museum with Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt as one of the crowd of greats. Both artists exhibited with the Klimt group, but at different times—Conrat in the early years and Koller only after 1908. Ries was an art star who frequented Olga Wisinger-Florian’s (1844-1926) salon, where she met many of her aristocratic patrons, but she did not belong to the same circles as Elena Luksch-Makowsky, the other Russian émigré who exhibited with the Secessionists. Neither mentioned the other in their memoires or extant letters. While Luksch-Makowsky worked closely in the collaborative Klimt group, spending time with her husband, Richard Luksch, Ferdinand Hodler, and the inner circle of the Secessionists, Ries worked in the solitude of a large-scale sculptor while maintaining an extremely active public presence—in newspapers and exhibitions throughout Vienna. Blau fit the profile of the exceptional woman, an artist who withstood serious gender prejudice and obstacles and became financially independent from a young age. She was active in the Kunstschule, and had many friends and students, among them Rosa Mayreder, who studied painting with her. But she was reluctant to join separate women’s artist groups, or even allow her work to be shown with them.

Women artists who exhibited their works in Vienna came from a cosmopolitan cross section of diverse nationalities, sexualities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This statement is true of the women profiled here, as well as the larger memberships of separate women’s art unions. Together, Blau, Ries, Luksch-Makowsky, Koller, and Funke cover a variety of hybrid identities: lesbian, married, single, parent, widowed, and divorced; Austrian, German, Russian, and Jewish; extremely wealthy or in modest circumstances. Even age is well represented: Luksch-Makowsky had the earliest start, studying with her artist-father as a child, while Funke had the latest, beginning her art education at age 30. They also cover the gamut of media: applied arts, sculpture, painting, and printmaking.

Ernst Gombrich, the great art historian who emigrated from Austria to London, has been criticized for saying that Jews played an incidental role in the arts of Vienna.³⁰ But what he actually wrote was that the coveted positions in commerce and intellectual life which were beyond the reach of rustics, untrained in modern skills, and not sought by members of the conservative establishment, naturally attracted many Jews from the various provinces of the multinational monarchy. The intellectual ferment of Vienna which has so often been described of late must largely be seen in this context.³¹ I think he has been misrepresented. Gombrich was himself an assimilated Jew, and when asked about what role Jewish culture played in his early life, he responded: actually none. My parents had converted. I went to Protestant religious school and can still recite the articles of the Lutheran Creed that we had to memorize. How does one define a Jew? I have been forced to think about this question longer than I have cared to. Jewishness is either a religion, and I don’t belong to it, or according to Nazi teaching, a so-called race, but I don’t believe in race.³² When asked whether he thought the Jewish tradition was a cultural force he replied,

I don’t believe that there is a separate Jewish cultural tradition. I think the German Jews were largely assimilated. Many didn’t even know that they had Jewish roots. The tradition of Bildung, which also played a large part among the Jews, was something quite different . . . But when one is asked today, one naturally says Yes, I’m Jewish. The right answer would be, I am what Hitler called a Jew. That’s what I am.³³

Gombrich’s statements do not, to my mind, contradict Beller’s argument that the Jewish contribution to Viennese creativity came from assimilation, and that the Jews were more German than the Germans. Gombrich’s disbelief in race is well founded: according to recent studies, race does not exist when broken down scientifically, although it can become institutionalized once its concepts have entered the world of representations.³⁴ Gombrich lived through the most extreme case of institutionalization of race (e.g., determining proportions of Jewishness and marking people with stars and middle names Sara). The life of Tina Blau is telling in regard to the institutionalization of identity: she did not appear to selfidentify as Jewish at all, even telling the emperor she was Aryan, born in the military barracks; only after she died did her identity as a Jew become an issue in her art historical reputation—first in her erasure and then in renewed attention at a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in Vienna (discussed in chapter 1). Kutlug Ataman, one of many contemporary artists who deal with how race is represented, has put it aptly: I do not think identity belongs to the individual. Identity is like a jacket. People you never see will make it and you wear it. Identity is something other than you, outside of you. It’s a question of perception. You can be aware of it and manipulate it, play with it, amplify it, or mask it for infinite reasons.³⁵ Women who chose to become public artists were the least likely to wear the jacket that someone else made. Ries, Blau, Luksch-Makowsky, Koller, and Funke all made interesting lives for themselves as public artists, traveling individual paths in which they became intellectually engaged with modernist developments in not only Vienna but also the art centers of Europe. The reader may discern instances where they amplified, masked, or played with aspects of their identities (e.g., being a woman, being Russian), but constructing identities was incidental—a by-product rather than the focus of their lives. All of these artists were deeply interested in the world around them, whether it was literature (the Russian folk-tale or the gruesome tales of Rabelais for Luksch-Makowsky), the formal experiments of the Fauves (for Koller and Funke), the art nouveau of Belgium (for Conrat), antiquity (for Ries), or even music: a close identification with the Anton Bruckner circle (in the case of Koller, who also loved Wagner) or Brahms (in the case of Conrat, whose cellist father had translated Hungarian gypsy folk songs for him). Identity, to Eleanor Heartney, who has recently surveyed contemporary artists’ representations of race and identity, is like a reflection in still water—it is only clearly visible until you reach out and try to grasp it in your hand.³⁶

Because the aim of this study is more than just telling a new story about women—I also want to explain how they were forgotten—I should clarify my use of the word modernism. Vienna at the turn of the century has been characterized as the birthplace of modernism, but only in fields outside the history of art—in cultural studies, philosophy, science, music, psychology, architecture, and literature. In the discipline of art history, Vienna has never been considered a center of Modernist developments. By Modernism with a capital M, I refer to the doctrine articulated best by Clement Greenberg: that the best art is self critical about its own medium and is autonomous. Modernist painting excludes narrative because literature is extraneous to the medium of paint; rather than describing textures, like velvet or a shiny brass basin, or the illusionism of a room in perspective, a Modernist painter would allow the paint itself to take precedence over the thing represented. The term never referred to a break with the past or a break with tradition, but was about a historical view of progression. In Greenberg’s formulation, Manet was the first Modernist painter, because his paint took precedence over what he depicted (what we admire in a Manet still life of oysters is how he handled the paint, rather than the illusionism of the shells, for example). Old masters had an inverse relationship between design and representation: design was always there but subordinated to the thing depicted; Manet represents a turning point in this relationship, but not a break with the past. Modernist artists referred to old masters in their art. Manet updated Titian, for example, while Picasso painted within traditional genres: the nude, the still life, the portrait. His Modernist renditions (the Cubist portraits, for example) do not allow the viewer to lapse into a reverie of illusion: one is thwarted by the ruptures in the illusion. The continuity with the past works in another way too: the lineage of progression in Modernism goes from Manet to Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. Gauguin, Matisse, Malevich, and Mondrian are familiar touch points in this teleology. They were each Modernist for their time. Klimt’s use of allegory introduced a narrative element, and his tendency to combine abstract motifs with naturalistically rendered bodies seemed to look backward in this scheme.

By autonomy Greenberg meant freedom from social context and politics. This is why the white cube space of the art gallery is so well suited to showing Modernist works—it removes them into an aesthetic vacuum, where the works relate to each other in a historical progression. This is what Modernism is, in a nutshell. Greenberg’s ideas have been critiqued: the Modernist art of Abstract Expressionism was not really autonomous, but used by the CIA to promote the idea of American freedom during the Cold War.³⁷ The system excluded women. And the decorative, a term used throughout Europe to describe a nascent abstraction, came to be seen as the opposite of Modernism. The decorative became the feminine, the add-on, the nonessential, while abstraction was good: the pared-down essence, the truth, purity, and autonomous. One of the biggest blind spots of Modernism is this separation of the decorative from the abstract. Visually, of course, the decorative is abstract, which is why courses in decorative painting were offered at modern art schools like the Kunstschule in Vienna, and Matisse and Gauguin referred to their compositions as decorative. In Vienna, too, the discourse around modernism began to shun the decorative when it became too closely connected to femininity, as discussed further in chapter 5.

Although the Secessionists were early adopters of aspects of international Modernism—they showed themselves as part of a lineage of great artists, and arguably even invented a prototype for the white cube—Vienna’s brand of modernism never fit into Greenberg’s scheme. Like postmodern artists today, Vienna’s avant garde wanted to reconnect society with art, rather than removing art into a realm of autonomy—values that artists like Luksch-Makowsky and Koller shared. Even the abstractions that Klimt employed are usually read as surface decorations rather than experiments in abstraction. But if we can go back in time, before Greenberg’s ideas were concentrated into a formulation and became so influential (Greenberg, like Adorno, formulated many of his aesthetic ideas in the 1930s and 1940s), we can see a nascent modernism that was still in flux in Vienna, one where women were participants. Vienna was a center for the decorative and it was taken seriously by architects and art historians, most famously among them Alois Riegl, who based some of his most innovative scholarship on studies of decorative objects and patterns.³⁸

It is ironic that as a value system Modernism excluded women: particularly in Vienna, it was women who were most closely connected to its aesthetics. Most of the women artists I profile traveled to Paris, a center for the Modernist aesthetic system described by Greenberg. Recently, scholars in Vienna have noted the international aspects of Viennese modernism and its exchanges with French artists—primarily in Belvedere exhibitions devoted to the Vienna Paris connection and the Galerie Miethke, which brought exhibitions of important Modernist painters of France (Van Gogh, Gauguin) to fin-de-siècle Vienna. It is in these exhibitions where women artists have begun to take prominent roles. Aesthetically, the forward-looking approaches of Koller, Luksch-Makowsky, Funke, and Blau and their comfort with the favored genres of modern art—the still life, the landscape, and the nude—would shift the narrow reading of fin-de-siècle Vienna from being primarily about allegory to one inclusive of a more autonomous, international Modernism. But the object is not to make Vienna fit into an old scheme, even if some of its women artists did aesthetically. Modernism, as we have seen, excluded women, and when the Vienna 1900 exhibition made its rounds from the Künstlerhaus to the Pompidou and then New York’s Museum of Modern Art, women were only completely excluded in the MoMA version. Its curator, Kirk Varnedoe, explained in a film interview why women artists are excluded from the walls devoted to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

There’s no remaking history in a certain sense. History happened the way it happened and it so happened that modern art—which is what this museum is about—began largely as an endeavor of white European males. Brute fact. There are a number of historically determining factors. But history being what it was, I’m not sure which woman painter in those galleries I’m betraying the mission of the museum by not showing. I think if I thought there was one, I’d try to get her on the walls or to go out and acquire one.³⁹

In considering the expansion of MoMA’s exhibition space, Varnedoe noted there would be more women in the postmodern sections, but

will the balance get better in Post Impressionism? No, I don’t think so. I’ve been looking for a long time. I don’t see what’s going to bump the Cézannes off the wall. I don’t see a picture fighting its way in against the Starry Night, Cezanne’s Bather, or Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy by a woman artist of that period. I may be surprised but I don’t know who that person is. So is that percentage going to change? Unlikely.⁴⁰

It is not surprising, then, that Varnedoe, who wrote the catalogue for the New York version of the Vienna 1900 exhibition, did not include any women in the exhibition.⁴¹ Adding to the individual and institutional erasures of the 1930s and 40s, an art historical myth about quality, as evidenced in Varnedoe’s comments, has reinforced the omission. Too 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.⁴² In his perceptive review of the exhibition, Schorske noted that Varnedoe was avowedly committed to safeguarding art and its appreciation from what he sees as the distorting impact of the Vienna regime, the dangers of the ‘contextualist vision’ in presenting Vienna’s art, and the excesses of ‘the revisionist rebellions within academic art history in the last twenty years, against . . . ahistorical formalism.’⁴³ At the time, no one, not even Schorske, noticed that women artists were missing. The idea that women were not part of Modernism, and only became important public artists in the postmodern phase, had become a truism in the history of art by 1986.⁴⁴ This study aims to correct that misperception.

In my estimation, Vienna’s greatest innovation was as a center for Raumkunst (installation design), which absorbed all other arts. Aesthetically, too, Vienna’s avant garde embraced art with themes of time, narrative, performance, and the body, categories in which Russians Ries and Luksch-Makowsky especially excelled. The elements of time and narrative, of course, are more in keeping with postmodern values than modernist ones. Vienna’s modernism, then, is distinct from the more doctrinal variety. There are relatively few studies of Vienna’s modernism outside Austria, as art history is generally very French centered. Many of the field’s most brilliant feminist scholars have focused on France;⁴⁵ because of this perhaps, Vienna offers yet fascinating avenues for investigation, and our picture of it has been much too limited, in part because of the erasures of women’s participation.

This study is organized in three parts: the first five chapters profile exemplary women artists, with a focus on their public exhibitions and commissions, followed by a reflection on the historiography of forgetting in each case; second, the art union history (for women and men) is given a close reading and analysis through behind-the-scenes notes from the Ministry of Religion and Education, which made all decisions about union funding. Next, popular discourse on women artists is more closely examined through an analysis of the reception of the 1910 retrospective of women artists. This section also demonstrates how famous historical women artists (e.g., Sofonisba Anguissola, Rachel Ruysch, Angelika Kauffmann) were, and shows what happened when new publics and critics began to discuss the woman artist. Finally, the erasures of 1938 are discussed, and an appendix lists women artists who were active in Vienna, many of whom were murdered in concentration camps or emigrated. Throughout, the various materials of art criticism, visual culture, exhibitions, diaries, and personal letters, are examined carefully. The resulting picture shows that if gender was the most important organizing factor in the culture, it was hardly a monolithic culture of repression. On the contrary, there were many powerful and talented women who, through their public works of art, achieved great acclaim in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Together, the chapters on individual women artists and collectives establish that