Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918-1939

Project Information

CRAACE

Grant agreement ID: 786314

DOI

10.3030/786314

Project closed

EC signature date 15 June 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 29 February 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 468 359,00

EU contribution

€ 2 468 359,00

Coordinated by

Masarykova univerzita
Czechia

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CRAACE (Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918-1939)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

CRAACE concerned the legacy of the Habsburg Empire in architecture and art in central Europe in the period 1918 - 1939. Traditionally, the year 1918, when the Habsburg Empire collapsed, has been treated as a caesura, inaugurating an entirely new state of affairs. Focusing on Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which emerged from the ruins of the former Austria-Hungary, this project questioned such an account. It asked: How did the cultural and social elites respond to the new political reality. How did they address the memory of the Habsburg Empire? How did the successor states construct new identities and what place was envisioned for the visual arts? How did artists and architects respond to these imperatives?

This project focuses on a moment of crisis - the collapse of Austria-Hungary - and examined how artists, architects and elites respond to that crisis. It considered the ways in which art and architecture served as a vehicle of social memory – and thereby aiding social, cultural, political elites and institutions in central Europe in their attempts to interpret recent events, as well as making sense of the present in the light of that past. The project examnined how states, churches, civic organisations and individuals sought to set out an identity, using art, architecture and design.

The project was concerned with central Europe, but its concerns had much wider relevance, and it also considered comparator examples, as part of an anlaysis of the resilience of societies and cultures in following times of crisis. The importance of the project derived from the fact that, in moments of turmoil and political change, art and architecture often serve as mediums whereby new identities are explored and expressed. Yet times of social instability can lead to the creation of comforting myths and narratives of national continuity and identity that interfere with a more open and frank self-interrogation. The project was concerned with examination of such myths, as both laid out in the immediate post-war era. As such, it was also critically engaging with orthodox historical narratives that have been accepted and repeated ever since.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work undertaken during the project included both basic examination of primary sources and materials (both unpublished and archival sources as well as historic published materials) and critical examination of secondary literature. Much of the material had never been examined before, and the project therefore undertook important documentary archival work, examining original materials relating, for example, to participation in international fairs, debates over the role of the Catholic church in the interwar period (and the kind of architecture that was acceptable), regional and vernacular modernisms.

The projected resulted in 106 published outputs, which consisted of scholarly monographs, book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals, and edited journal volumes, as well as shorter research papers on individual works of art and architecture, and reviews of recent relevant literature. The latter were published on the project
website: https://craace.com which served as a platform for wider communication of the project findings.

The project also staged 2 conferences (on the general themes of the project and on comparative case studies of post-imperial practices from elsewhere, such as Ghana, Korea, Russia, Germany, Poland and Mongolia. The project also staged 4 workshops on: (1) Vernacular modernisms; (2) Art and collective memory in the interwar period; (3) Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture; (4) World fairs and exhibitionary practices.

The project is signed up to the Open Data Pilot project, and is accessible on the Open Science Foundation repository.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project challenged traditional histories of the art and architecture of interwar Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia. These had tended to be selectively narrated to confirm certain wider stereotypes about national identity and character and to legitimise certain aspects of the past (for example, the idea of Czechoslovakia as the only liberal progressive interwar state in central Europe, the place of Red Vienna as the idealised social democratic municipal governance).

The project highlighted the need to critique such embedded understandings, in order to overcome one-sided accounts (particularly those privileging the avant-garde), leading to a greater emphasis on ambiguity, ambivalence and what one might term the 'grey zones' of modernism. Specifically:

Research on ‘vernacular modernism’ showd that regional trends were intertwined much more closely with constructions of a ‘national art’ than previously expected. Modernisms in Tyrol or Košice in eastern Slovakia, for example, were not merely retrograde or conservative counterparts to the putatively progressive artistic centres of Vienna and Prague but, rather, important currents in their own right that serve to redefine the narrative of modernism as traditionally configured. The project also highlighted the importance of religious (especially Catholic) modernisms in all three countries. While historiography has tended to marginalise overtly Catholic artists and architecture from narratives of modernism, the project demonstrated that they were central to cultural life and that there was a symbiotic relation between leftist ‘progressive’ and more conservative Catholic cultural practices. The project also served as a corrective to the tendency to regard the interwar Catholic church as simply anti-modern; one of the key issues of debate amongst Catholic intellectuals was that of trying the meaning of ‘Catholic modernism’. In relation to exhibitionary practices, the project demonstrated the tensions and conflicts between individual agents involved in exhibition organization and state administrations seeking to use exhibitions as instruments as cultural diplomacy. The large-scale literature on world fairs (of which there has been little in relation to central Europe) has tended to focus on top-down state determined missions and objectives. In contrast, the project demonstrated the different agents involved, from individuals to civic organisations and industrial companies, and examined their competing agendas. Finally, the project also demonstrated the competing and conflicting constructions of the past the collective historical memory and they were articulated not only in historical accounts but also in visual media. These represented not only differing factual understandings but also rival ideological visions, which were often at variance with canonical accounts. For example, in Hungary, while a reactionary and conservative vision of the past was given state sanction by the authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy, there was also no shortage of dissenting interpretations that foregrounded the multi-cultural nature of Hungary as well as moments of radical opposition, peasant and proletarian solidarity.

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