Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (review)

Nearly a quarter century has passed since the publication of Benedict Anderson's seminal study, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,which stormed the academic world in 1983. Since then we have become used to thinking of nations as constructed, "invented" and "imagined" cultural entities, and scholarship has explored almost every aspect of national culture, often with cultural, gender and postcolonial historians leading the way. It is fitting that art historians have taken up the topic, particularly as national identity was an abiding concern of European artists and a central topic in public culture during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As editors Michelle Facos and Sharon L. Hirsch claim in their introduction, "the importance of the issue of national identity in late-nineteenth-century art has only recently attracted art historical attention in exhibitions, monographs and surveys seeking to identify the major themes and concerns of the turn of the previous century. It is in the context of this recent recognition that the present study emerges" (3).

Correspondingly, the volume's eleven essays trace the contribution of the visual arts and architecture to the formulation of national identity, focusing primarily on countries on Europe's peripheries—Hungary, Norway, Romania for example—rather than those at its core (although the volume does contain essays on France, England and Germany). Yet, as the essays show, this volume becomes more than an account of the influence of nationalism on the visual arts at the turn of the century. More can be gained by an art-historical look at nationalism than an accumulation of information about national movements and their use of culture. By merging literature on art history with studies of nationalism, this collection of essays also takes up the topic of modernism with illuminating and important results.

Modernist art and nationalist movements have often been viewed as existing at opposite ends of an ideological spectrum. This has been particularly true for scholarship on the countries of central and eastern Europe, Germany above all. Facos and Hirsch attest that reframing the topic of late-nineteenth-century art includes recognizing the centrality of national identity to the emergence of modernism. They assert "the role of nationalism as an essential component of late-nineteenth-century art," (3) but they do not reduce the topic of "national" art to examples of political propaganda or collapse it back onto the familiar terrain of historical painting or national monuments. Rather, the contributors show how the search for a unique national cultural identity, which motivated European artists from Scandinavia to the Balkans and from Scotland to Romania, intersected with impulses toward the "primitive" and "authentic," the local and the modern. Such motifs and symbols became the ground on which new visual languages could be thought out. As the contributors show, moreover, it was the emergence of international modernism which created new arenas for artists to exhibit their national identity as well as a new set of tools for articulating it.

In terms of nationalism, each of the essays documents the placement of the visual arts in movements for national identity after 1890. The presence of visual languages drawing on "national romanticism" and the importance of the public platform provided by international exhibitions and world's fairs—as well as in national or municipal projects such as the design of government buildings or the decoration of schools and universities—figures in most of them. Many of the authors reference the search for a mythic past that occupied artists and nationalists alike (the essays on Hungary, Scotland and Norway by Terri Switzer, John Morrison and Patricia Berman respectively are particularly interesting in this regard). This aspect of the volume is straightforward and interesting.

The topic of modernism—central to the overall direction of the volume—receives a more mixed treatment, as it is not addressed by all of the authors. Those who do, however, do so in an illuminating...