Difference and Unity in Habsburg Vernacular Art
Mechtild Widrich, School of the Art Institute Chicago
The Vienna Secession’s mythos centering on a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk integrating Arts and Crafts into high culture, overlooks the ethnic tensions in folk cottage industries and vernacular art arising from the Habsburg Empire’s 19th-century identity struggle. Shows such as Vienna’s 1873 World Exhibition and Prague’s 1895 Ethnographic Exhibition used farm houses and vernacular heritage as frameworks of ethnic distinction from and, especially in Prague, even resistance to the German-speaking center. In contrast, scholars such as Croatian ethnographers Antun Radić and Izodor Kršnjavi emphasized a shared vernacular heritage over nationalist divides, challenging nationalist narratives.
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.