The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the BodyLiberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts

Abstract

What remains to be learned about and from ‘Vienna 1900’, that object of seemingly endless fascination for cultural historians of Western modernity? Plenty, these two books suggest. Operating within the framework of ‘politics and culture’ established by Carl Schorske’s classic Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, each finds productive ways to challenge the limitations of and extend outward from established models. Alys X. George offers several provocations in The Naked Truth. First and foremost, George’s book questions the persistent fascination with the psyche and cultural inwardness, proposing instead that a concern for the body, ‘the physiological human being, with all its attendant naked truths’ (p. 4), constituted an equally important ingredient of Viennese modernity. Additionally, The Naked Truth redresses the overriding attention to high art and elite male protagonists by showcasing a diverse cast of actors. Without ignoring the well-known domains of painting, literature and medical science and figures like Egon Schiele, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Sigmund Freud, The Naked Truth adds genres as varied as ‘free dance’, hygiene fairs, ‘biological gymnastics’, silent film, ‘ethnographic’ displays and advertising posters. Much of this cornucopia is authored by or addresses women, members of the working classes and people of colour. In contrast, Liberalism, Nationalism, and Design Reform sticks to a single area of cultural production, that of institutional design reform. Still, this too has been a neglected area of study, which only recently has emerged as a prominent feature in modern Vienna’s cultural-political landscape, with potential implications for a range of scholarly concerns, from politics, to gender, race and class, to mass consumption and media. Most notably, Liberalism, Nationalism, and Design Reform travels well beyond the confines of Vienna itself, presenting design reform as a project of pan-Imperial concern. Many under-studied institutions and figures around the Empire are introduced here, from Brno to Zagreb. The book’s ambitious scope is enabled by three authors who bring geographical and linguistic range to a field that has previously relied on a German-speaking, Vienna-centred perspective.