The Vienna School and the small people
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper focuses on the attitudes of the Vienna school followers to art created by “the small people” of villages and towns. It primarily examines the writing of Czech art historians, namely Zdeněk Wirth, Antonín Matějček and Vojtěch Birnbaum, on folk art but also looks at parallels in Austria and Hungary. It pays special attention to the question of class suggested in the texts of these art historians and argues that especially in Czechoslovakia, shaped as a modern, industrialised nation after 1918, folk art played an important role in the new class structure. The paper takes as a departing point Wirth’s definition of folk art from 1909 published in Styl, where he described it as art meant “for a specific social class and created by artists of this class, i.e. the art of the rural class and of the small people in village towns.” Influenced by the Alois Riegl, Wirth argued that this class was defined by its isolation, its relative self-sufficiency, but also by the influence of the patriarchal family structure and its slow pace of life. Wirth and others also shared Riegl’s view that folk art was a simplified version of high art and was doomed to extinction. As such, they argued that it could be studied, classified and appreciated but not reproduced. I therefore ask the following questions: How was “the art of small people” understood in the Czech lands and in other countries of the former Habsburg Monarchy, especially Austria and Hungary, before and after the war? Was it seen as purely secondary and derivative, or capable of creating new values? Can the views of Czech art historians be considered as a continuation or a revision of the Vienna school? And finally, how did these views reflect the class composition of Austria Hungary and the successor states? |
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