The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary

Matthew Rampley is Principal Investigator for the research project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939, funded by the European Research Council, and Professor of Art History at Masaryk University. His recent publications include The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience and The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847-1918, both published by Penn State University Press. Markian Prokopovych is Assistant Professor of History at Durham University and the author of In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House, the Audience and the Press, 1884-1918 and Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914. Nora Veszpremi is a Research Fellow on the project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939, funded by the European Research Council, at Masaryk University. She is the author of Foelfujt pipere es koeltoi mamor: Romantika es muveszeti koezizles a reformkori Magyarorszagon [Overblown makeup and poetic frenzy: Romanticism and popular taste in Hungary, 1820-1850].

"This is a highly original study. There is no other comparative treatment of the development of art museums in the major cities of the Habsburg monarchy, and only such a study can address effectively the analytic questions about the development and functions of the art museums in a changing public sphere that are raised here." -Gary B. Cohen, author of Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 "While the history of British, French, and Italian museums has received extensive coverage in recent Anglophone scholarship, the history of collections in the Habsburg lands is much less widely known. Composed by experts in the empire's many cultural worlds, this volume fills that gap, breaking new ground by illustrating how a polyphonic empire generated a rich profusion of highly diverse museums." -Suzanne Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship "This is a well-written and organized overview of the history of fine arts display in late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary and will be of interest to any scholar who studies cultural production or urbanization in that period." -Laura A. Detre, Journal of Austrian Studies