Matthew Rampley

Markian Prokopovych

Nóra Veszprémi

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 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere. Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.

Art and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary

When Austria annexed Galicia during the first partition of Poland in 1772, the province's capital, Lemberg, was a decaying Baroque town. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lemberg had become a booming city with a modern urban and, at the same time, distinctly Habsburg flavor. In the process of the "long" nineteenth century, both Lemberg's appearance and the use of public space changed remarkably. The city center was transformed into a showcase of modernity and a site of conflicting symbolic representations, while other areas were left decrepit, overcrowded, and neglected. Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 reveals that behind a variety of national and positivist historical narratives of Lemberg and of its architecture, there always existed a city that was labeled cosmopolitan yet provincial; and a Vienna, but still of the East. Buildings, streets, parks, and monuments became part and parcel of a complex set of culturally driven politics.

Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914

Habsburg Lemberg

Carl Bethke

Tamara Scheer

This collective volume seeks to approach the practice of language diversity in multi-ethnic urban societies of Austria-Hungary and place it both within its local and its larger European context, and within the broader studies of multilingualism and multiculturalism.

Language Diversity in the Late Habsburg Empire

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: the role of liberalism as a political, cultural and economic ideology motivating the museums’ foundation, and their engagement with the politics of imperial, national and regional identity of the late Habsburg Empire. This book will be of interest for scholars of art history, museum studies, design history, and European history.

Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts

Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire

During the 1884 inauguration of the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest, political elites staged a gala concert in the auditorium while the angry crowd, excluded from this ceremony, demonstrated on the street. In 1917, the crowds queuing to a Béla Bartók premiere needed to be forcibly held back. The book follows the history of the contested institution through a series of scandals, public protests, repertoire controversies and their representation in the urban press of the time. Such conflicts often led to larger issues that concerned the Opera House as a music institution, the birth of the modern public sphere and the modern audience. Thereby, the book calls for a critical rethinking of the cultural history of Budapest and Hungary in the late Habsburg Monarchy.

Markian Prokopovych

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