Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire

Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts

Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, Nóra Veszprémi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000768299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

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.

1 ‘For the Encouragement of Industry’

The Founding of the Museums of Design and Applied Arts

Matthew Rampley

Introduction

Since the elevation of Austrian industry creates a pressing need for industrialists of the fatherland to be able to make better use of the means of assistance art and science provide in such great quantity for the encouragement of commercial activity, in particular the improvement in taste, I have determined that an institute with the title ‘Austrian Museum for Art and Industry’ should be founded as soon as possible. This museum is to receive suitable objects from my court collections, from the Arsenal in front of the Belvedere line, from the University of Vienna, from the Polytechnic Institute and other public institutions, and these objects should be loaned to the museum with retention of the right of ownership, such that their return on request will be in exchange for others.¹

With this note of 7 March 1863 Emperor Francis Joseph set in motion the creation of the first museum of design and applied art in Austria-Hungary the following year. At the behest of Archduke Rainer, cousin of the Emperor, Rudolf Eitelberger had attended the 1862 International Exhibition in London, where he compiled a report on the displays of the visual arts.² Eitelberger was particularly impressed by the display of British artworks, but his greatest praise was reserved for the public museums and galleries of London, which ensured that artists had ready access to substantial collections of artworks. He devoted greatest attention to the South Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace (by then relocated to Sydenham), which, he argued, represented two complementary approaches to visual education: instruction through science and instruction through entertainment. For Eitelberger, both indicated the recognition in Britain of the importance of visual instruction for all classes, in comparison with which ‘Our museums are still impenetrable.’³ The success of Britain’s artists at the Exhibition was closely linked to the provision of such public institutions, as well as to the extensive support and encouragement for the arts by Albert, the Prince Consort. Consequently, Eitelberger noted, ‘We in Austria cannot give in to the illusion that we can attain success, even on the field of art industry, without supporting high art, without support for the most accomplished talents.’⁴

Eitelberger persuaded Archduke Rainer and, ultimately, the Emperor, to create a museum in emulation of Britain. For even though there were some notable Austrian successes, there had been little general ‘improvement of taste’ amongst Austrian industrialists. As he later reminisced, ‘what is usually understood as design and applied art stood, on the Austrian side of things, at a relatively low level.’⁵

The story of the museum’s foundation is well known. Eitelberger was named its first director and he emphasized strongly its role as an instrument of modernization. This narrative has seldom been challenged, but for perhaps understandable reasons, he overstated its novelty. For while it was a new kind of institution, dedicated to ‘industrial art,’ it came into existence against the background of an established tradition in Austria-Hungary of design exhibition. Moreover while the story of Eitelberger’s museum encourages us to direct our gaze towards Vienna, that tradition owed its existence to the activities of industrialists in Bohemia rather than the imperial capital.⁶ This is not to belittle Eitelberger’s achievement, but in order to gain a clearer sense of its historical origins, we should consider not only the immediate circumstances of its creation, but also the practices of design display in Austria-Hungary that preceded it.

Eitelberger saw the mission of the museum as improving the quality of design through the elevation of taste, but while he may have described design reform in such terms, this hardly begins to assist critical understanding of the museum, its activities and goals, and the questions to which it was meant to be an answer. For the museum was established to address a series of profound social, political and cultural transformations that were taking place. These included: the crisis in political legitimacy of the Habsburg Empire in the mid-nineteenth century following the loss of most of its Italian territories and, later, expulsion from German affairs; anxiety over Austria’s relative economic backwardness; the decline of traditional structures of artisanal training and employment; the rise of a middle-class consuming public and the consequent diversification of demand and taste; the emergence of mass production and mass consumption; the rise of global free trade; the assertion of local cultures in the crownlands of the Empire and the challenge to Viennese hegemony in the arts. Before considering the development of the Vienna museum itself – as well as the growth of design museums elsewhere in Austria-Hungary – it is thus worth examining those factors, as well as the earlier history of exhibitionary practice.

Before the Great Exhibition

The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the International Exhibition of 1862 are rightly held to have had a transformative effect on European design and applied arts, but they built on a long history of industrial exhibitions, especially in Austria and Germany. In Austria, the first such event was staged in 1754 by Otto Loscani, governor of Bohemia, in the grounds of Count Johann Rudolf Chotek’s castle in the small town of Weltrus (now: Veltrusy), just north of Prague, to mark the visit of Empress Maria Theresa. There are few historical sources to provide much detail, but one outcome was the creation of commercial counsellors for Bohemia in 1755, tasked with overseeing and reporting on economic and industrial activity in the kingdom. A concern with industry thus came to be seen as integral to modern enlightened government and, as Rita Krueger has argued, the Bohemian aristocracy played an important role as sponsors of agricultural, economic and scientific innovation in Enlightenment Austria.⁷ It was in recognition of the benefits of the event in Veltrusy that an industrial exhibition was held in Prague in 1791 to coincide with the coronation of Habsburg Emperor Leopold as King of Bohemia. It was also on a much larger scale, with some 150 artisans and manufacturers exhibiting nearly 50 different classes of goods, including flax, silk and linen textiles, tableware, glass, tinware and lacquered papier-mâché.⁸ Staged in the great hall of the Clementinum, site of the former Jesuit university, the exhibition was followed by a sequence of such events to be held in Prague, starting in 1828.

The exhibitions of 1754 and 1791 had been organized for a very limited audience: members of the court and the Bohemian aristocracy. This reflected the fact that they had been meant to mark a royal visit and also that many of the most important workshops in Bohemia were located on aristocratic lands; indeed, the Bohemian nobility had an active interest in fostering economic activity on their estates. The exhibition of 1828, however, was directed much more explicitly at the emerging civil society in Prague. Submissions had to be made to a commission; the chair, Count Josef Dietrichstein, was still a member of the nobility, but the rest of the membership was composed of professors from Prague Polytechnic and the University.⁹ By the time of the exhibition of 1831, the commission had been expanded to include prominent local industrialists, a curator from the recently created National Museum, and representatives of different artistic and artisanal trades.¹⁰ Dietrichstein was also instrumental in the founding in 1833 of the Association for the Encouragement of the Spirit of Enterprise in Bohemia (Verein zur Ermunterung des Gewerbs-geistes in Böhmen), an organization that anticipated the later industrial associations (Gewerbevereine) that would be central to setting up museums of design across the Empire.¹¹

The fact that Prague and Bohemia were the sites of the earliest such exhibitions in Austria can be attributed, in part, to the practical consideration that they were closer to Germany, the major market for Austrian industry. In addition, Bohemia was one of the most industrially advanced regions of the Empire. Bohemian glass had been famous for centuries, and ironworking was also a major industry. Karlsbad (now: Karlovy Vary) in western Bohemia was the location for numerous ceramics workshops (the most notable being the firm of Haas & Czjzek). One of the most successful furniture manufacturers in Austria, Joseph Ulrich Danhauser (1780–1829) was also to be found in Bohemia.¹² The famous furniture company of Thonet would also be based in Czech lands, although in southern Moravia, to the north of Vienna, rather than Bohemia. One might also add to this list Reichenberg in northern Bohemia, which was a major centre of cotton textile production and Brünn, the ‘Manchester of Moravia,’ which was famous for its woollen mills.

The exhibitions coincided with an expansion in economic activity following the Napoleonic Wars, and were part of a concerted attempt to promote and enhance the quality of the material culture of the Empire. The practice was adopted in Vienna in the 1830s, but whereas those in Prague were focused on local manufacturers, those in the capital purported to be representative of all Austrian industry, even though, due to the uneven distribution of industrial activity, it was Vienna, Bohemia, Lombardy and Venice that tended to dominate. Thematically organized, and accompanied by carefully compiled catalogues, such events are testament to an exhibitionary culture of growing sophistication.¹³ The practice also spread out beyond Prague and Vienna to cities such as Klagenfurt (1838), Graz (1841) and Laibach (1844, now: Ljubljana). It is a sign, too, of the growing importance of the professional and industrial middle classes that these events were increasingly organized by local industrial associations in place of the earlier aristocratic patrons. Industrial exhibitions were staged in Germany, too, the first in Mainz in 1842, but by far the largest was the General German Industrial Exhibition of 1844 in Berlin, with over 3000 exhibits and more than 250,000 visitors.¹⁴ The preponderance of such events in Germany and Austria undoubtedly underlay Prince Albert’s later enthusiastic support for the London exhibitions.

In addition to this early culture of display, there were a number of institutions where the latest examples of design, applied arts and technology were on permanent display. The most important was the ‘Imperial Royal Cabinet of Physical and Mechanical Machines’ (k.k. physikalisches und mechanisches Maschinenkabinett) in the Vienna Polytechnic, which was already being listed as a public attraction in guide books in the 1820s. As one publication noted, ‘the diversity of the objects on show invites the highest admiration and demonstrates to the viewer a period of industrial excellence in the imperial royal Austrian states.’¹⁵ The Cabinet, which consisted of a collection of industrial machines as well as models of machines and works of applied art by Austrian manufacturers, owed its origins to the creation of the Imperial Royal National Cabinet of Factory Products (k.k. Nationalfabriksproduktenkabinett) by Emperor Francis II in 1807. Manufacturers were instructed to submit sample products, in order to give the Emperor an overview of the state of Austrian industry. Modelled on the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, its purpose was to raise design standards by increasing awareness of the latest products by leading manufacturers.¹⁶ Although brought into existence by imperial decree, the Cabinet was never integrated into the larger imperial collections, but rather endured a nomadic existence in various palaces until, in 1815, it was moved into the newly founded Polytechnic (now: the Technical University), of which it became one of the three divisions.¹⁷ There it was to serve as a teaching aid...