Feminist scholars have been asking for decades: Where are the great female artists? More specifically, Julie Johnson asks how it was that women were written out of the history of modernism in Vienna. Her book, The Memory Factory, draws upon memory and Holocaust scholarship to explore the “erasure” of female artists from fin-de-siècle Viennese histories. As such, it straddles the disciplines of gender studies, history, and art history, providing ample evidence that indeed something has been lost in the telling of the story of art in Vienna circa 1900.

Johnson must wrestle with two canons throughout her endeavor—the canon of great art, dominated by men, and the canon of memory, buttressed by repetition, self-promotion, and what she calls “ancestor worship” among artists and their critics. Using sources such as newspaper reviews, feuilletons, sales of works, and institutional histories of women's and mixed-gender art unions, Johnson meticulously recreates an art world in which women showed their work, sold well, and generally throve. Certainly they were met with restrictions because of their sex, as Johnson outlines repeatedly. However, the overwhelming picture is one of feminine success. How then was this world erased? Johnson points to the high percentage of female artists who were Jewish, and thus were exiled or killed, along with the memory of their very public art forays. Thus, as she puts it, “[t]his gap, or silencing of the past, meant that when feminist art historians would begin to question the canon and the value system of Modernism in the 1980s, it was difficult to believe that Freud's Vienna might have been so diverse, with so many women working as public artists” (339).

Johnson sets up her book in an unusual but satisfying way. After a substantial introduction, she devotes the following five chapters to individual female artists: Tina Blau, Elena Lukusch-Makowsky, Bronica Koller, Helene Funke, and Teresa Ries. Each of these might stand alone as a portal into fin-de-siècle Vienna, and each is generously illustrated with wonderful reproductions. Johnson then offers three synthetic chapters, which both build upon the reader's knowledge of these five artists and introduce new figures into the mix. Chapter six, “Women as Public Artists in the Institutional Landscape,” traces women's associational work in both single-sex and coed artists’ unions. Chapter seven, “The Ephemeral Museum of Women Artists,” is a microhistory of the 1910 Viennese historical retrospective, The Art of the Woman, replete with tantalizing installation photographs and architectural plans. Here, Johnson really shows off her ability to do reception history, as she sorts through numerous reviews, criticism, and feuilleton essays. Finally, Johnson ends with a chapter entitled simply “1900–1938: Erasure,” which engages with some of the work of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past) and introduces us to even more women who made the difficult choice between exile, suicide, deportation, and death. She ends with an affirming appendix of biographies that covers over a hundred women, so that they might not again be lost to the story of art in Vienna.

Johnson relies on feminist scholarship, much of it done in the French context, throughout the book. It is a pleasure to find references to Linda Nochlin, Joan Scott, Gerda Lerner, and the Guerilla Girls throughout the text. Although the first five chapters tell a story of feminine success in the art world, the underlying misogyny of the period, combined with the erasure of this success in the interwar period, casts a pall on the reader. This is ultimately a very somber assessment, not just of Vienna 1900 scholarship, but also of art history in general. “Dispersal, destruction, and murder” are the fates available to the women Johnson so ably documents, and the feeling of doom catches up with the reader in unsettling ways (337). The Memory Factory provides an essential corrective, as well, to the debates begun by Carl Schorske in the 1980s about Viennese art and culture, a discourse that has brought fame and countless tourists to the city. Johnson's quiet reading of Gustav Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I, once a glory of the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and now relocated to the Neue Galarie in New York City after a restitution suit, resonates with any reader who has ever been made uncomfortable by the way Vienna packages and sells its past. In recovering parts of this contested past, Johnson has done us a great service.