The Memory Factory - (Central European Studies) by Julie M Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Memory Factory introduces an English-speaking public to the significant women artists of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, each chosen for her aesthetic innovations and participation in public exhibitions. These women played important public roles as exhibiting artists, both individually and in collectives, but this history has been silenced over time. Their stories show that the city of Vienna was contradictory and cosmopolitan: despite men-only policies in its main art institutions, it offered a myriad of unexpected ways for women artists to forge successful public careers. Women artists came from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. However, and especially because so many of the artists were Jewish, their contributions were actively obscured beginning in the late 1930s. Many had to flee Austria, losing their studios and lifework in the process. Some were killed in concentration camps. Along with the stories of individual women artists, the author reconstructs the history of separate women artists' associations and their exhibitions. Chapters covering the careers of Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Helene Funke, and Teresa Ries (among others) point to a more integrated and cosmopolitan art world than previously thought; one where women became part of the avant-garde, accepted and even highlighted in major exhibitions at the Secession and with the Klimt group. "This is an excellent addition to the literature on fin-de-siaecle Vienna, well-researched and well-argued. It highlights little-known artists and situates them in a novel interpretation of women's roles in the art world. The author challenges dominant tropes of feminist historiography and thus sheds new light on twentieth-century art history and historiography," Michael Gubser, James Madison University. "--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

The Memory Factory introduces an English-speaking public to the significant women artists of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, each chosen for her aesthetic innovations and participation in public exhibitions. These women played important public roles as exhibiting artists, both individually and in collectives, but this history has been silenced over time. Their stories show that the city of Vienna was contradictory and cosmopolitan: despite men-only policies in its main art institutions, it offered a myriad of unexpected ways for women artists to forge successful public careers. Women artists came from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. However, and especially because so many of the artists were Jewish, their contributions were actively obscured beginning in the late 1930s. Many had to flee Austria, losing their studios and lifework in the process. Some were killed in concentration camps. Along with the stories of individual women artists, the author reconstructs the history of separate women artists' associations and their exhibitions. Chapters covering the careers of Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Bronica Koller, Helene Funke, and Teresa Ries (among others) point to a more integrated and cosmopolitan art world than previously thought; one where women became part of the avant-garde, accepted and even highlighted in major exhibitions at the Secession and with the Klimt group.

Review Quotes

Woman's Art Journal Volume 34 #1Spring/Summer 2013The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900 by Julie M. JohnsonPurdue University Press, 2012
Reviewed by Megan Brandow-Faller
Surmising the perils of separate women's art institutions, an anonymous reviewer for one of Austria's leading feminist periodicals quipped in 1916 that "the best success that one might wish of them is that they might no longer be necessary."
Julie Johnson's meticulously researched study of women artists in Viennese modernism lends support to the idea that corrective exhibitions, institutions, and monographs serve to ghettoize women artists from the art historical canon. The Memory Factory flies in the faceof feminist art historical inquiries stressing women's difference and embeddedness within separate institutions to argue that "women artists were not part of a separate sphere, but integrated into theart exhibitionary complex of Vienna" (4- 5). Drawing case studies of five highly successful women painters and sculptors closely connected to the Vienna Secession--Tina Blau (1845-1916), Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), Broncia Koller (1863-1934), Helene Funke (1869-1957),2 and Teresa Feodorowna Ries (1874-1956)--Johnson refutes the historiographical tendency to lump women artists into an aesthetic "room of their own," seeking explanations for women artists' canonical exclusion in "anew center ... whose themes have not always fit into the dominant narrative structures of art history" 111). Such an approach, Johnson maintains, is not useful, for the art historical "mothers" that she spotlights were leading practitioners of the dominant strategies of modernism. Indeed, painters like Funke and Koller often transmitted French Post- Impressionistic influences ahead of their male colleagues, in a more purely autonomous manner than Klimt and other allegorical painters, while exemplifying the Vienna Moderns' interest in psychological interiority and nascent abs

The Forward Newspaper
January 12, 2013

When writing of great Viennese artists, influential historians such as Carl Schorske in his landmark "Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture" do not even mention sculptor Teresa Ries (1874-1956), Impressionist landscape painter Tina Blau (1845-1916), and figurative artist Bronica Koller (1863-1934). But posterity can play strange tricks. And now, in "The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900" author Julie Johnson makes a strong argument that these once-celebrated Jewish artists have been unjustly overlooked.

Johnson, a University of Texas art historian, notes how all three women shared a strong sense of self-worth and a penchant for making bold statements, and not only artistic ones. The Russian-born Ries was expelled from the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts for scolding a teacher who did not evaluate her classwork. After she was established as a celebrity sculptor in Vienna, Ries -- whose admirers included Stefan Zweig and Mark Twain, who sat for a portrait -- penned her 1928 memoirs, "The Language of Stone," a powerful, feminist document. In it, Ries dismissed critics and museum-goers who claimed that her heroic, sometimes tormented marble carvings were influenced by Auguste Rodin: "That is often the first impression of lay people, somewhat in the way that for Europeans, all blacks look alike." Ries further dismissed the "opinion that the man is necessarily the inseminator, also in art," and added that her works, especially a once-famous statue of "Lucifer" actually preceded Rodin's "Thinker," which supposedly influenced it.

In a 1902 self-portrait, an oil on canvas now in The Vienna Museum, the statuesque Ries, garbed in her artist's smock, strikes a haughtily prideful pose, challenging the viewer much as she challenged readers in her autobiography. The artist's fiery temperament can be deduced from another passage from "The Language of Stone," describing her 1909 marble sculpture "Eve" whi

HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 2012.

Julie M. Johnson. The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of
Vienna 1900. West Lafayette Purdue University Press, 2012. 368 pp.
$35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55753-613-6.

Reviewed by Megan Brandow-Faller (City University of New York
(Kingsborough)
Published on HABSBURG (November, 2012)
Commissioned by Jonathan Kwan

_Frauenkunst_ and Its Discontents: Women Artists in the Circles of
the Vienna Secession

In 1916, when surmising the perils of separate women's art
institutions, an anonymous reviewer for one of Austria's leading
feminist periodicals quipped that "the best success that one might
wish of them [separate women's art exhibitions] is that they might no
longer be necessary."[1] Julie Johnson's important and meticulously
researched study of women artists in Viennese modernism lends support
to the idea that corrective exhibitions, institutions, and monographs
serve to ghettoize women artists from the art historical canon.[1]
_The Memory Factory_ flies in the face of feminist art historical
inquiries stressing women's difference and embeddedness within
separate institutions to argue that "women artists were not part of a
separate sphere, but integrated into the art exhibitionary complex of
Vienna" (pp. 4-5). Drawing case studies from five highly successful
women painters and sculptors closely connected to the Vienna
Secession (Tina Blau, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Broncia Koller, Helene
Funke, and Teresa Feodorowna Ries), Johnson refutes the
historiographical tendency to lump women artists into an aesthetic
"room of their own," seeking explanations for women artists'
canonical exclusion in "a new center ... whose themes have not always
fit into the dominant narrative structures of art history" (p. 111).
Such an approach, Johnson maintains, is not useful, for the art
historical "mothers" that she spotlights

The Heartblog.org

By andrea kirsh

June 24, 2012 - 1 Comments

Julie M. Johnson." The Memory Factory; The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900" (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012) ISBN 978-1-55753-613-6

It's remarkable that recent scholarship can force significant reconsideration of an artistic culture as well-studied as that of Vienna around 1900, but that's what Julie M. Johnson's work has done. As such, it will be required reading for anyone interested in Vienna's turn-of-the-century art and art institutions, particularly the schools and the artists' associations and unions - which functioned much as today's artists' collectives and artist-run spaces. It is also an important contribution to women's studies and to the historiography of art, for it documents a group of women artists who were active in Vienna's art world around 1900 but were entirely written out of later historical accounts.Tina Blau, Aus Dem Prater (In the Prater), pastel on board, private collection

Based upon intensive archival research, Johnson demonstrates that, unlike the better-studied situation in Paris, women in Vienna had access to art education, and while they were barred from official membership in the major artists' unions, that didn't keep those same groups from exhibiting their work. In fact, women participated in the mainstream modernist art movements in Vienna. The city not only trained local women, but attracted women from Russia, Germany and the provinces. They had successful careers, exhibiting across Europe; their work was acquired by the emperor, the state, and private collectors; they received public commissions, and exhibited in major exhibitions at the Kunstlerhaus and the Seccession, commercial galleries and alternative venues.

Theresa Ries in her studio

Tina Blau (1845-1916) introduced Impressionist painting to Vienna and became financially successful through her work. Her paintings were purchased by the Emperor and shown in solo ex

"This is an excellent addition to the literature on fin-de-sicle Vienna, well-researched and well-argued. It highlights little-known artists and situates them in a novel interpretation of women's roles in the art world. The author challenges dominant tropes of feminist historiography and thus sheds new light on twentieth-century art history and historiography."--Michael Gubser, James Madison University

"This is an excellent addition to the literature on fin-de-siecle Vienna, well-researched and well-argued. It highlights little-known artists and situates them in a novel interpretation of women's roles in the art world. The author challenges dominant tropes of feminist historiography and thus sheds new light on twentieth-century art history and historiography," Michael Gubser, James Madison University.

About the Author

Julie M. Johnson teaches contemporary and modern art history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has held Fulbright and IFK residential fellowships in Vienna.