The author draws on a wide range of sources, ranging from the material to the visual and the literary: bold and influential architectural exteriors, intimate interior spaces, historicising sculptures and paintings, and Modernist objects of everyday utility. While the growing presence of anti-Semitism in Viennese political culture provided an increasingly ugly context, the commissioning, co-designing, displaying and sharing of a range of buildings, images and objects provided Jews with important tools of self-articulation and communication with their gentile interlocutors. Subsequent actors toyed with the fluid gender identities and sexual mores that fascinated Jewish and gentile commentators alike, and used architecture to assert cosmopolitan arguments against the increasingly strident voices of conservative reaction. In their greater concern for eastern Jewish motifs the authors of the Secession House, by contrast, embraced a more overtly “different” oriental idiom, while still contributing to a conversation about architecture and design that cut across the Jewish-gentile divide. The palaces commissioned by Eduard von Todesco and Gustav von Epstein on the city’s Ringstrasse, for example, are taken to show how Jewish patrons of this generation asserted a Hellenic identity that was at once recognisably Jewish and part of a shared European inheritance. In successive case studies of architectural historicism, secessionism, modernism and the avant-garde, Shapira demonstrates how individuals ranging from industrialists and merchants to publishers and writers used their commissioning practices as an opportunity to assert both belonging and difference. Drawing a firm distinction between “Jewishness” as a set of characteristics ascribed by anti-Semites on the one hand and “Jewish self-identification” as processes of exploring and asserting one’s own ethnic, religious and cultural subjectivity on the other, she explores how Jewish patrons worked out their relationships both to Jewish and to gentile culture during the period in which Vienna evolved into a modern city. However, Ernst Gombrich’s subsequent assertion that there was no such thing as “Jewish culture” reflected a widespread nervousness about being seen to project the negative, homogenising gaze of National Socialism onto the rich variety of lives, activities, projects and perspectives that constituted the Jewish presence in modern European society.Įlana Shapira steps boldly into this minefield with Style and Seduction, a wide-ranging, thoughtful study of bourgeois Jews as patrons of architecture and design in late-19th and early-20th century Vienna. More than 20 years ago, Stephen Beller advanced the controversial thesis that Jewish agency in the advent of Modernism was so profound that the latter could only be made sense of as a project largely determined by the former. Not least because of the manner in which some of the 20th century’s most notorious anti-Semites made the link, the relationship between Jewish identity and the art and architecture of Modernism has long been a thorny topic.
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