In April 2019 the project is moving to Masaryk University in Brno. Here are answers to some of the questions you might have.
Tag: modernism
Artwork of the Month: Monument to Ferdinand Lassalle by Mario Petrucci (1928)
On 6 May 1928 the ceremonial unveiling took place of a monument to Ferdinand Lasalle in Vienna. Located in the north-eastern suburb of Brigittenau, and placed in front of the recently built Winarsky Hof, a communal housing project built by the municipality, the monument commemorated Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). A native of the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), Lassalle had no obvious connection to Austria. He was, however, a leading figure in Socialist politics in the 1840s and 1850s, having been imprisoned for his support for the 1848 revolution. It was in recognition of his commitment to socialist politics that in 1863 he was appointed the first president of the General German Worker’s Association, forerunner of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It was for this reason that the monument was erected to him in Vienna some 60 years later, for Vienna city council was dominated by Social Democrats, whose social and cultural policies earned the capital the name of ‘Red Vienna.’
Exhibition Review: Have No Fear of Modernism!
For eleven years, from 1928 to 1939, the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava (Škola umeleckých remesiel – ŠUR) was the hub of a budding Slovak modernism. Founded amid an economic crisis in a small city, the conditions for the ŠUR were not favourable – and yet, supported by the sheer determination of its director Jozef Vydra, it thrived as a public school that was, pronouncedly, not concerned with modern art but modern life. The first international exhibition about the ŠUR in the post-socialist era was shown at the city museums of Zwickau and Leverkusen and at the Bauhaus Dessau foundation in 1998, accompanied by a rich catalogue. While presenting an important initiative in unearthing the history of the ŠUR, the exhibition and catalogue, bearing the title Das Bauhaus im Osten (‘The Bauhaus in the East’), was conceptualised in close relation to Germany’s most legendary art school, over-emphasising the link between the two, at the cost of ignoring others. Twenty years on and in time for the ŠUR’s 90th birthday (as well as the Bauhaus centenary), the Slovak Design Museum puts a corrective lens on the school’s history with an exhibition in the spaces of the Historical Museum in Bratislava Castle.
Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum
The Royal Academy of Arts commemorates the centenary of the deaths of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt with an exhibition of their drawings from Vienna’s Albertina Museum, which emphasises their close artistic relationship as the ‘father and son’ of Viennese modernism (Schiele was 28 years Klimt’s junior). Their untimely deaths in 1918, by extension, have long been construed as the symbolic end of Viennese modernism – an interpretation that CRAACE aims to challenge.
Catalogue review: Košice Modernism
In 2016, the International Cultural Centre Kraków presented the exhibition Koszycka moderna / Košice Modernism in cooperation with the East Slovak Gallery in the town of Košice. Its catalogue, reviewed here, remains the most recent analysis of Košice Modernism: a term coined by curator Zsófia Kiss-Szemán, and referring to the cultural upsurge in the 1920s Košice, today in eastern Slovakia. Part of Hungary in the Habsburg Empire, the town was an important centre for commerce, located at the intersections of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Carpathian Ruthenia. With the collapse of the empire, Košice became part of Czechoslovakia in 1918 as an approximately 50,000-strong border town with a mixed Slovak, Hungarian, Jewish, German and Czech population. As the exhibition argues, these socio-political and geographical particularities shaped Košice’s cultural development: while its strategic position on a trading route meant that Košice’s multi-ethnic community could flourish, its incorporation into Czechoslovakia introduced a democratic form of government, which allowed a degree of political freedom that was especially significant for leftist artists seeking refuge from the Horthy regime in Hungary in 1919.