Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna, 1900 by Tim Bonyhady (review)

Tim Bonyhady, an Australian lawyer, curator, and art historian, currently the director the Centre of Climate, Law, and Policy at the Australian National University in Canberra, was born in a gold mine—not a literal gold mine, to be sure, but an astonishingly rich cultural gold mine. As a child, growing up Australian, he had little idea of the European treasures around him. Gradually, though, he learned that his grandmother’s odd furniture was not just any odd furniture but pieces designed exclusively for his grandmother’s family by Vienna’s great fin de siècle architect and designer Josef Hoffmann. He learned that one painting in his grandmother’s apartment was a portrait of Gustav Mahler by Emil Orlik and that the writing on the painting was Mahler’s own autograph; he learned too that not only was another painting a genuine Klimt, but the elegant woman Gustav Klimt portrayed was also none other than his own great-grandmother, Hermine Gallia. And that wasn’t all. In his relatives’ old crates and suitcases, Bonyhady discovered heaps of old bills and concert programs, newspaper clippings and personal letters, photographs and diaries. He discovered, he says, that his grandmother’s apartment was “one of the great pieces of fin de siècle Vienna transported to Botany Bay” (7). This treasure trove, supplemented by a wide range of archival materials, permitted Bonyhady to reconstruct both a compelling “portrait of a patron family” and a sweeping Viennese narrative that reaches from turn-of-the-century Austria to today’s Australia.

Bonyhady sorts his thirty short chapters into four large sections, each of which focuses on a woman central to the story. His first section concentrates on his great-grandmother, the subject of Klimt’s portrait, Hermine Gallia. The second section is devoted to Bonyhady’s grandmother, Hermine’s daughter, Gretl. The third tells the first part of the story of his mother Annelore; the final section continues his mother’s story aft er her flight to Australia, when she changed her identity from Austrian to Australian and her name from Annelore to Anne.

Hermine’s story provides a breathtaking vision of fin de siècle Vienna at its height. The life stories of Hermine and her husband, Moriz Gallia, provide in miniature a social history of one particular Vienna—the Vienna of Jewish immigrants who convert to Christianity, who strike it rich, who create Vienna’s “second tier” of society, just below the aristocracy, and who become both generous philanthropists and indispensable patrons of the arts. Vienna’s population in the late nineteenth century was exploding, its economy was booming, and for some, at least, there were fortunes to be made. Moriz Gallia made his fortune in the manufacture of light bulbs; he and Hermine used their fortune to live luxuriously, to support charities, and to underwrite Viennese modernism.

The Gallias knew everyone. For readers interested in fin de siècle Vienna, following Hermine and Moriz’s lives means attending Mahler premieres and the opening of the Secession building; having Klimt over for dinner; engaging Josef Hoffmann as their apartment designer; gossiping with Alma Schindler Mahler.

Bonyhady is interested in his family’s histories, not historiographical controversies, yet in the midst of his stories Bonyhady touches on a range of themes that extend far beyond his relatives. Just how alienated were avant-garde artists? Socially, not very. Klimt, Hoffmann, and the others were intimately linked to and actively supported by much of Vienna’s wealthy elite. Was avant-garde culture separated from the wider popular culture? Not really, at least not in the lives of the Gallias, who would attend a Klimt show or a Mahler production one evening and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show the next.

The book answers a slew of interesting questions. How did anti-Semitism work in Viennese society? Answer: In a myriad of sinister ways. Even Jewish converts to Christianity sometimes used the same sorts of slurs and...