Flirting with Culture

Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday, written from exile in 1937, recalls the years before the Great War as a "world of security," where Vienna was a cosmopolitan city alive with ubiquitous eroticism, intellectual splendor, and, above all, a unique love for the arts. "Only with respect to the arts," he writes, "did everyone in Vienna feel the same entitlement, for love of art, in Vienna, was considered a common obligation." Art transcended origins and class; art replaced the privilege of birth. No wonder, then, Zweig continues, that the real lovers of the arts, the real audience, came from the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, for here was a social group fluid and unburdened by traditional values, whose members could become, everywhere, "the patrons and champions of all new things."

In many ways, Elana Shapira's impressive book Style and Seduction reflects Zweig's firsthand observations, adding color and nuance to a by now well-trodden field of Jewish patronage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also a timely book whose publication coincides with the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Ringstraße Boulevard and the resurgent interest in, as it were, Ringstraße studies, inspired by both scholarly and popular inclinations. Only a year ago, a veritable flurry of exhibits celebrated the history of the "Ring" in various museums in Vienna, including the Jewish Museum, which featured The Vienna Ringstraße: A Jewish Boulevard, anticipating some of the material and observations Shapira has developed on her own.

But Style and Seduction is not only about the Jewish presence on the Ringstraße. It is a book about Jewish art lovers and the way they helped shape Vienna's cultural scene from the 1860s to the years just prior to World War I. Shapira's organizing principle is a chronology of dominant stylistic periods. The story she tells unfolds logically from "The Historicists," a chapter that focuses mainly on the Jewish predilection for neo-Renaissance palaces on the Ringstraße, to "The Secessionists," where she untangles the Jewish ties to Joseph Maria Olbrich's Secession House and its founding movement, to "The Modernists," which establishes Jewish affinities to and vital support of the pioneering design movement of the Wiener Werkstätte, finally arriving at "The Avant-Gardists," a chapter centered around Adolf Loos's architectural agenda as a subtle strategy for the "modernization," or rather de-Judaization, of Vienna's Jews.

What sustains this impressive historical arc is Shapira's quest for a "new semantics" of modern Viennese architecture and design–a semantics that makes it possible "to treat Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a question of Jews actively fashioning a new language to convey their aims of emancipation as well as claims of cultural authority" (p. 2). The culture that shaped modernist Vienna, she argues, was one of collaboration, of creative relationships between Jewish clients and patrons and their (gentile) architects, that involved acts of self-fashioning which would not only open new possibilities of "Jewishness," but would also give birth to a "new aesthetic" defining the urban landscape of fin-de-siècle Vienna. For Jewish patrons and clients, Shapira intends to show, style became a matter of "exposure and concealment in representing the Jewish self," a subtle interplay of acculturation and self-identification manifested in iconographic detail and allusion. In contrast to gentile patrons, she argues, Jewish patrons in Vienna "preferred to serve [as] a template for a collective group," expressing their interests and agendas in "direct relationship to their Jewish identification" (p. 13).

This, no doubt, is a very bold claim deliberately aimed at scholars who, like the Vienna-born art historian Ernst Gombrich, refrained from acknowledging such Jewish identification and such stark distinctions between gentile and Jewish sensibilities. In his well-known lecture at the Austrian Cultural Institute in London in 1996, which set the stage for Shapira's musings, Gombrich insisted that, "One does not do a favour to the...