FT-254173-17 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Laura Morowitz | Art, Exhibition and Erasure in Nazi Vienna | 6/1/2017 - 8/30/2017 | $6,000.00 | Laura | | Morowitz | | | | Wagner College | Staten Island | NY | 10301-4495 | USA | 2017 | Art History and Criticism | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 | Preparation of two chapters of a book on art exhibitions in Vienna under Nazi rule between 1939 and 1945.
From 1938 to 1945 Austria was annexed into the German Reich and placed under Nazi rule; an independent Austria ceased to exist and it became the Ostmark, or Eastern-most region of the German nation. As in all other realms of culture, art exhibitions and art history were enlisted in reshaping the public memory and the identity of Ostmark. In the city of Vienna, one of the most important cultural capitals of the world, art exhibitions took on a special charge. This book examines three exhibits held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus between 1939 and 1945, focusing on the way in which art was used to replace a contested image of Vienna—a city with a particularly rich, complex relation to the arts, including tremendous contributions from Jewish artists and patrons—with an invented Ostmark. The motivations and functions of the exhibits under study, as well as the art historical interpretations and texts connected with them reveal a great deal about the fate of Austrian identity and Nazi ideology. |