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.
Matthew Rampley is Principal Investigator for the research project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939, funded by the European Research Council, and Professor of Art History at Masaryk University. His recent publications include The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience and The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847-1918, both published by Penn State University Press. Markian Prokopovych is Assistant Professor of History at Durham University and the author of In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House, the Audience and the Press, 1884-1918 and Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914. Nora Veszpremi is a Research Fellow on the project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939, funded by the European Research Council, at Masaryk University. She is the author of Foelfujt pipere es koeltoi mamor: Romantika es muveszeti koezizles a reformkori Magyarorszagon [Overblown makeup and poetic frenzy: Romanticism and popular taste in Hungary, 1820-1850].
"This is a highly original study. There is no other comparative treatment of the development of art museums in the major cities of the Habsburg monarchy, and only such a study can address effectively the analytic questions about the development and functions of the art museums in a changing public sphere that are raised here." -Gary B. Cohen, author of Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 "While the history of British, French, and Italian museums has received extensive coverage in recent Anglophone scholarship, the history of collections in the Habsburg lands is much less widely known. Composed by experts in the empire's many cultural worlds, this volume fills that gap, breaking new ground by illustrating how a polyphonic empire generated a rich profusion of highly diverse museums." -Suzanne Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship "This is a well-written and organized overview of the history of fine arts display in late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary and will be of interest to any scholar who studies cultural production or urbanization in that period." -Laura A. Detre, Journal of Austrian Studies
